 Good morning, Kick It's Tuesday. Today I would like to tell you the story of the unlikely survival of a book. Alright, so during the Turtles All The Way Down movie shoot, I became friends with the second assistant director, Tracy, who's worked on everything from like, iRobot to Hot Tub Time Machine. And one day we were chatting and she revealed that she grew up in the small town of Flynnflawn, Manitoba. Now, as the grandson of somebody from Skullbone, Tennessee, I have long been fascinated by unusual place names. And Tracy explained to me that Flynnflawn got its name from a novel, The Sunless City, published in 1905. Now I have a long-standing rule that if a friend gives me a strange out-of-print book, I read it because you never know when you're going to discover long-lost literary treasure, and I told Tracy about this. And then, just as COVID was settling upon my house, what should arrive in my mailbox but The Sunless City? Okay, first the author, Joyce Emerson Prestig Muddock, wrote over 50 books in his lifetime. He was mostly known as an author of detective stories, like he wrote detective stories about this Glaswegian detective called Dick Donovan, and they were as popular as the Sherlock Holmes stories for a while. But Muddock also wrote travelogues and literary fiction and true crime, and a bit of sci-fi. You've probably never heard of Muddock, I know I haven't, and it's important to remember he's more the rule than the exception. Like, books don't last forever, and very, very few books even last for an average human lifespan. Like, I've never heard of A.S.M. Hutchinson or Gertrude Atherton, but they wrote the best-selling American novels of 1922 and 1923, respectively. The year The Great Gatsby came out, these were the 10 most popular novels in the United States, and if you've heard of more than one of these authors, you're better read than I am. In general, books, for lack of a better term, die young, like it is far more rare for a book to live to 100 than it is for a person. And so there's nothing surprising about J.E.P. Muddock's work being totally forgotten. What's surprising is that it's not totally forgotten. Which brings us back to the Sunless City, a tale of a vast and seemingly endless lake whose secrets are discovered by one Josiah Flintabaddy Flonatin, a snuffin man of science. And by snuffin, I mean, he snorts tobacco up his nose over and over again in the book. Flintflon, as he is nicknamed, discovers that the lake is a kind of portal into a world underneath our world, and he takes this mechanical fish submarine that also doubles as a sailboat way down deep into the lake, and then eventually comes out in the new Earth. That part is really quite exciting, and in this upside-down interior world within a world, everything is paved with gold, and tin is the valuable mineral. It's the one that's used in coins and crowns. And then he discovers a great underground kingdom with all these people who have tails, and the kingdom is run by a council of women, which Flintflon does not like. Now I suppose one could read Flintflon's wildly misogynistic response to a matriarchal society as satire, but the problem is Flintflon is consistently presented as like the smartest and most wise man in the world. And at one point he says that if women were in the US Congress, I very much fear I should be false to my allegiance and forsake my dear old stars and stripes. So yeah, there's a reason we don't read a lot of Maddox these days, but to be fair, the book hasn't survived because of its story. It's survived because of its protagonist's incredible name. Because when a Canadian prospector named Tom Creighton came across a large and deep vein of copper, he decided to name his mind the Flintflon Mine, because he'd just read The Sun with City, and the town that grew up around that mine came to be called Flintflon as well. Flintflon is going through a hard time, the biggest mine in the town is closing this year, but it continues on, and as long as it does, the best of JEP Maddox's work will also survive. And I find that kind of lovely. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.