Crichton got his undergraduate degree at Harvard, too, and during his years at the university, he wrote fiction on the weekends under the pseudonym John Lange “because you weren’t taken seriously as a doctor if you did anything but” medicine, Sherri Crichton said.
His time in rotation at Massachusetts General Hospital inspired not a lifelong medical career but a book — and a movie script that would eventually become a long-running hit series for NBC: “ER.”
Crichton, who died of cancer in 2008, channeled his love of science and tech into novels like 1969′s “The Andromeda Strain” and 1990′s “Jurassic Park.”
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You’ll feel a bit of both in “Eruption” — the novel that Crichton began and James Patterson finished. The book hit shelves June 3 and seems primed for a movie-rights bidding war. (There’s a bit of Crichton’s “Twister” in there, too, with a scientists-vs.-natural-disaster story line.)
In the new novel, Hawaii’s Mauna Loa is about to erupt — and threatens to blow up the government’s hidden cache of “Agent Black,” a radioactive waste that would destroy all plants — and thus all life on Earth.
With screen-ready characters like daredevil protagonist “accomplished surfer”/volcanologist Dr. John “Mac” MacGregor, it’s pulpy popcorn summer fiction that will appeal to fans of both Crichton and Patterson — a Venn diagram that just may be close to a single circle. There are a few parallels to Crichton’s 1990 “Jurassic Park,” including science-gone-wrong, and an ancient enemy: here, not dinosaurs but volcanoes. “Not that this is a follow-up to Jurassic,” Patterson, 77, said in a recent Zoom, but it’s “kind of Jurassic-ish.
Patterson and Sherri Crichton spoke to the Globe via Zoom from their respective homes: Patterson in Palm Beach, Fla., and Crichton in Santa Monica, Calif.
For Crichton, “Eruption” was a way of keeping her late husband’s legacy alive, especially for her son. Michael died of cancer in 2008 at age 66. John Michael Todd Crichton is now 15.
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“When Michael passed away, I was pregnant with our son,” she said. “Part of my way of keeping Michael close to me was to get into his work. I started looking through files and realizing there was so much left unfinished. It quickly became clear that I had to create his legacy, his archive.”
It involved going through “a labyrinth of hard drives, and computers and files. In there, was this volcano story.”
Volcanos, she said, were a passion for Michael. He loved Hawaii. They had a home in Hanalei Bay on Kauai. Eventually, she pieced together what she had of the story. “I read the manuscript, and I didn’t want the manuscript to end,” said. The story wasn’t finished. “There has to be an ending,” she said.
“A little more than an ending needed, but yeah,” Patterson added.
“But there was an incredible amount of material,” Patterson said. “And Sherri decides, for some reason, I’d be an interesting person to finish the novel. So she went to Hachette, to Little Brown, to see if I’d be interested. I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. Let me read what we have already.’”
When Patterson read it, he was in.
“I went: Wow, I love this,” he said. “They don’t write ‘em like this anymore.”
“We didn’t know exactly where it was gonna go — but the hook was there, the concept was there,” Patterson said.
Crichton said Patterson “took the care” to “really figure out the puzzle.”
The two men share the book’s byline, but one thing Patterson and Sherri Crichton won’t disclose is how much each author wrote.
“We never get into that,” Patterson said. “What we don’t want to do is have people — it’s a nice game for people to play, but we don’t want to help them with it — try to figure out where Michael stopped writing, and I started writing.”
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The novel contains native Hawaiian characters, and Patterson said they had some readers from Hawaii. The book’s dedication, written in both English and Hawaiian, is “To Hawai’i’s own… the people of the famed island chain.”
Crichton said she appreciates that Patterson was “respectful” of her late husband’s original story. “I’ve worked with people in the past [where] all of a sudden, it’s their story, subtext, Michael.”
As for movie possibilities, the response from Hollywood “has been really amazing,” Crichton said. “We have some calls that are lined up for pitching later this week.”
According to a January Deadline article, “Eruption” is planned as “the first of a book and film trilogy.”
“We’ll see what happens,” Patterson told the Globe, calling a trilogy “definitely a real possibility.”
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Lauren Daley can be reached at ldaley33@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @laurendaley1.
