EDDY LANE
Eddy Lane writes the history that never made the guidebooks. He grew up in the Santa Cruz Mountains and around the Monterey Bay. His stories begin on roads he has traveled all his life. Each one recovers a true mystery or a forgotten life and tells it the way the people who lived it might have felt it. His novels follow the same instinct farther afield, from a California logging town in 1885 to Constantinople in 1204.
Forgotten Ground
Forgotten Ground is California’s other history, told one place at a time. Eddy grew up between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Monterey Bay. Family camping and ski trips first took him into the Sierra Nevada. College took him north to Chico and Humboldt. These days he rides a Harley through the gold country and up the North Coast. Every one of those roads passes towns that once mattered and then went quiet.
The series follows the people who lived on that ground, from the Gold Rush into the twentieth century. Lumbermen and lighthouse keepers. Chinese fishermen and railroad crews. A prophet who built a kingdom beside a mountain highway. Families who held a funeral for their valley before the water came. Some of these mysteries were solved and then forgotten. Others were never solved at all. Every one of them happened on ground you can still stand on.
Book One
From the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Monterey Bay
A whale mistaken for a sea serpent, a prophet’s roadside kingdom, and a town drowned on purpose. Eleven true stories the record almost lost.
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Book Two
From the Sierra Nevada to the North Coast
A wagon-trail death that became a murder that never happened, and a mining superintendent who walked into the hills and never came back.
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Book Three · A Novel
The Dead Don’t Answer
Boulder Creek, 1885. A constable lets a killing go down as an accident. Then a second body surfaces in the mill pond.
Learn more“Where the record falls silent, that silence is part of the story.”
Book One stays close to home, from the redwood canyons above Santa Cruz down to the Monterey Bay shoreline. Book Two climbs into the Sierra Nevada, then follows wagon roads and mining camps out to the schooner ports of the North Coast. The Dead Don’t Answer drops you into Boulder Creek in 1885, when the mills ran day and night. Every story starts in the archives, in county ledgers and coroner’s inquests that few people ever read. Start with the ground closest to you.
The Third Fire
The Sack of Constantinople, 1204
The army came to save an emperor. It stayed to strip a city.
Constantinople, 1203. An interpreter keeps a secret ledger of false debts while a crusader fleet sits in the harbor and three great fires tear through the greatest city in the Christian world.
The history behind the books
The Drowned Keeper of Año Nuevo Island
A light station on a bare island off the San Mateo coast. Four men drowned crossing to shore in 1883. Two women were left to run the whistle.
Read the articleThe Chinese Who Built Yosemite’s Roads and Fed Its Founders
Hand-cut roads, a hidden hotel kitchen, and the camp cook whose dinners helped create the National Park Service.
Read the articleThe Flume That Ran Down the San Lorenzo Valley
For ten years a wooden river carried redwood from Boulder Creek to Felton. The men who walked it had a plank a foot wide and no railing.
Read the articleStay in touch
New books, new chapters of forgotten history, and the stories behind them. A note when something new is out, never more than that.