Best-selling author of colonial adventure fiction, H. Rider Haggard employs a triumvirate of individualist heroes for his most famous novel,
King Solomon’s Mines(1885): Durban-based hunter and trader Allan Quatermain, country squire Sir Henry Curtis, and retired naval-officer Captain John Good.
Supposedly written following a bet with his brother that he could not equal Treasure Island (Monsman, 11; see also Foden), Haggard’s story opens with the latter two men approaching the book’s first-person narrator Quatermain to help them find Curtis’s lost brother, who has gone missing while searching for the eponymous diamond mines. Though he has always doubted its authenticity, Quatermain has a sixteenth-century blood-drawn map on a torn patch of clothing that purports to disclose a route
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Citation: Childs, Peter. "King Solomon's Mines". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 January 2019 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=9801, accessed 21 November 2024.]
