by Christopher Hodapp
To my surprise, my 2006 book, Solomon's Builders: Freemasons, Founding Fathers, and the Secrets of Washington D.C., has just been released as an unabridged audio book and is now available from Amazon/Audible for $18.18. Unfortunately for fans of audio books, there are many photos and illustrations in the print edition, so your enjoyment of Solomon's Builders may be less than ideal, unless you use it as a companion to the dead tree version. That's not me trying the old Chico Marx sales tactic, "One's no good - you gotta have the whole set." I'm just saying it's tough to contemplate the street plans of Washington DC or Sandusky, Ohio without actually seeing them.
Be aware that Solomon's Builders was written before novelist Dan Brown's hotly awaited Da Vinci Code sequel, The Lost Symbol, was released. Still, I actually enjoyed writing it more than any other book I've done. At the time, Dan Brown mania was in full force, and second-guessing his anticipated 'Masons in Washington DC' storyline was a cottage industry.
Shortly after Freemasons For Dummies was released in 2005, I received an obscene phone call from an editor at Ulysses Press who made me an offer few new authors can refuse: they wanted to pay me to write anything I wanted, as long as they could promote it as an unauthorized tie-in to Brown's sequel. I spent 10 days in Washington interviewing, researching, taking photos, and even getting threatened with arrest by the CIA in Reston. (Yes, really.) And, unlike the Dummies books with Wiley, Ulysses gave me little in the way of a deadline.
Brown's Masonic-themed The Lost Symbol finally came out in 2009, almost 9 years after his blockbuster DaVinci Code was released, and much of the speculation about his plot points that I made in my book turned out to be wrong. Brown – or his publisher – had leaked early on that his upcoming book was to be called The Solomon Key, hence my own title, which I ultimately liked, whether it tied in or not. But I wrote it in such a way that it was more of an overview of the Masonic backgrounds of the Founding Fathers and a Masonic guidebook to the city than the sort of "I'll bet he writes this" ripoff that so clogged up bookstore shelves at the time (usually with the word 'Code' in the title). Consequently, most of the book's content has withstood the lapse of time, and remains useful and informative.
BTW, as was done with Freemasons For Dummies several years ago, the publisher never asked me to narrate the recording - it's read by someone named Charles Constant, who does a fine job. I just wish an invitation had been extended to me, since I am an experienced voice-over artist who's recorded many commercials over the decades. I've encountered many Masons who have been disappointed when the recording wasn't me, but that's show-biz.
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