True Raiders: The Untold Story of the 1909 Expedition to Find the Legendary Ark of the Covenant by Brad Ricca
“At first, I desperately sought to avoid any links to Raiders [of the Lost Ark],” Brad Ricca writes in the endnotes of True Raiders, “but I came to the conclusion that the movie will unavoidably color a vast majority of any reading experience about the Ark.”
This is an understatement about the resulting text—Ricca’s final product includes sentences such as “‘The Well of Souls,’ Monty Parker said, his face lit by fire”—but it also reflects a real constraint on the reader: If Ricca’s band of treasure-hunting Englishmen had succeeded in their quest in 1909, then Indiana Jones and the Nazis would hardly have needed to go looking for the Ark in 1936, now, would they?
