How Michael Crichton’s Widow Unearthed a New Novel 16 Years After His Death

It’s like something out of a Michael Crichton novel.

After a bestselling author dies tragically from cancer at the age of 66, his pregnant widow assembles a crack team of experts — including a specialist in data recovery and the late author’s assistant — to rescue a passion project that he had been working on since 1994.

But this isn’t the plot of a novel. This is what actually happened following Crichton’s death in 2008 after a brief, private battle with lymphoma. The resulting investigation turned up “Eruption,” a new Michael Crichton novel released in early June, which became an instant bestseller and is being turned into a movie. The book, finished posthumously in collaboration with best-selling novelist James Patterson, chronicles the events surrounding a massive volcanic eruption that threatens to destroy Hawaii, and how they connect to a terrifying government secret.

“When Michael passed away, it was just very difficult, as you can imagine — I’m pregnant, I lost the love of my life and I was searching for a way to just stay connected to Michael,” Sherri Crichton, the “Jurassic Park” author’s widow, told TheWrap. “I quarantined myself in his office. I just needed to know. It was my way to stay connected to him.”

Once she started the process, it was clear she needed to establish some kind of Michael Crichton archive. It was a way for her son to “know what his dad did.” Sherri also admitted to not really knowing Michael’s work persona. “I knew his emotional side, our side, but I didn’t really know all of the details of work because he was very private,” she said.

By the time she and Michael met, he was already an established writer who had been married four times. Combing through his files would illuminate an aspect of their relationship that had remained in the shadows.

A prolific author and Hollywood hitmaker

Crichton, of course, was the medically trained author behind such juggernauts as “Jurassic Park,” “Congo” and “The Andromeda Strain.” He has sold more than 200 million copies worldwide, writing 29 novels, 14 of which were adapted into films. Many of his biggest hits utilized a “false document” technique, presenting the sometimes outlandish concepts as scientifically, plausibly real. He would often cite fake academic papers or include charts or graphs to back up his assertions.

Crichton was also deeply involved in filmmaking. As a director he made “Westworld” in 1973 (eventually turned into a celebrated HBO series) and the underrated thriller “Looker.” He also co-created the popular television series “ER,” based on an earlier Crichton screenplay, and co-wrote the screenplay for “Twister.” Other movies based on his work include “Disclosure,” “Sphere” and “The 13th Warrior” (based on Crichton’s novel “Eaters of the Dead”).

When Sherri Crichton started working on an archive of her late husband’s work, she “started uncovering amazing information about Michael, so much so that it was just shocking.” She was also searching for something else: A book about volcanoes she knew Michael had been working on since 1994. He was always talking about volcanoes, she said, and when they got married they honeymooned at Pompeii, the Roman city located south of modern day Naples that was destroyed and buried under ash after the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD.

Eventually Sherri ran across something called “The Black Zone.”

“I was covered in chills because this was the book,” she recalled. It was a partial manuscript, but still enough to start her on her quest. She assembled a team, including an archivist who was also Michael’s IT person and knew her way around his computers. Eventually they found a treasure trove of information, including material from the first day he started writing the book, and charts where he mapped out how long it would take to complete it, as he was working on other books at the same time.

She also found his research, which included everything from his early trips to the Big Island in Hawaii in the 1970s to Mount St. Helens, and other eruptions around the world.

I was covered in chills because this was the book.

Sherri Crichton on discovering the “Eruption” manuscript

Sherri and her team found keywords and sifted through documents, which became increasingly difficult because the title of the novel would shift. First it was “The Black Zone.” Then “Vulcan.” Then “Black Agent.” Further complicating matters was Crichton’s tendency to reuse names across various projects. The team would look into one character name, for instance, but find themselves in an unrelated document altogether.

“You would you go off on these trails, and then you hope that you’re still in the same book. You had to do the cross-referencing to make sure that, Oh, yeah, that’s the backstory ,” she recalled. There were even backstories for characters who didn’t make it into the final version of “Eruption.” And that was just the tip of the iceberg, er, volcano.

Choosing an author to finish the novel

“It is a behemoth of research and information,” Crichton said. “And then I didn’t want to let it go. I was like, ‘This is so important to Michael.’ I was always searching for that next page.”

So she set out to find an author who could finish the book.

“When I finally said, ‘OK, this is ready, I do have all the pieces of the puzzle,’ I also thought, Who can do this justice ? I really wanted to make sure that I aligned with somebody who can beat him on the page.”

Sherri had been through this before. She’d chosen Richard Preston, a science writer perhaps best known for his bestselling nonfiction book “The Hot Zone” about the white-knuckle origins of the Ebola virus, to complete “Micro,” Crichton’s unfinished novel about a group of graduate students who are shrunk to tiny proportions. The book was published in 2011.

Shane Salerno, the screenwriter and founder of The Story Factory, an entertainment company that represents authors, suggested to Sherry that they needed to make “Eruption” an event. One way of doing that would be to get an author nearly as monolithic to help finish it. Sherri thought about how her late husband never read fiction. He was too busy researching. But she recalled going into his office and noticing that there was a row of novels by James Patterson, the American thriller writer who has sold more than 425 million copies.

“I thought, This is a wild shot ,” Sherri remembered. “Let’s see if he’s a Michael Crichton fan. Let’s see if he has time. Let’s see if he resonates with the material. And let’s see if he could fit it into his schedule. There’s a lot of factors.”

Fortunately for Crichton and Salerno, not only was Patterson a huge fan of her late husband’s work but he also “really wanted to honor Michael.” Patterson asked Sherri for all of Michael’s research, including videotapes of him on the top of a mountain with a volcanologist.

In piecing the book together, Crichton and Patterson were aided by her husband’s ruthless self-editing, a technique he picked up from the legendary editor Robert Gottlieb, who worked with Crichton early on. “We just moved straight through,” she said.

What she won’t divulge is how much of the book was her husband’s and how much ended up being Patterson’s.

She made a pact with Patterson, who has worked on several books with collaborators, including former president Bill Clinton. Patterson told her, “You know, when people don’t know, it keeps people in the book to try and figure it out.” Even Sherri, who has read the manuscripts for 13 years, sometimes doesn’t remember who wrote what part of the finished book.

“Eruption” was finally published in early June and became an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Like so many of Michael Crichton’s earlier novels, there is already a film adaptation of “Eruption” in the works from “Free Solo” and “Nyad” directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, which has landed at Sony Pictures.

“What is so compelling about Jimmy and Chai is their connection to Hawaii, their connection to wild adventure,” Sherri said. “They had a completely different and yet truly compelling interpretation of what they would do. And they stood apart from everybody else, though, I’m telling you the talent that came to the table was just phenomenal.”

Steven Spielberg, a frequent Crichton collaborator, also read and loved “Eruption,” she said. (There were earlier reports that he had a potential eye on directing the film adaptation.) When the book was being readied, it was framed as the beginning of a potential series of novels. Sherri Crichton didn’t address that directly in her conversation with TheWrap, but noted how many projects based on Michael Crichton’s work are still being mined today, including “Jurassic Park” and “Westworld.”

“For right now, I’m very happy settling in with the enjoyment that this book has been so well received,” Crichton said. “That’s what [Patterson] really wanted to do. He said, ‘I want to do my honor to Michael, but I want this to read like a great novel.’”

Pumping the Crichton well and finding secrets in The Brain

In addition to “Micro” and “Eruption,” two other archived Crichton novels have been released — “Pirate Latitudes” and “Dragon Teeth.” And the pulpy novels that Crichton released under his John Lange pen name have also been reissued. (Of the Lange novels, Sherri said that Michael would “pump those things out over a weekend.”)

With the publication of “Eruption,” it does feel that the untapped well of Crichton material may now be dry. Sherri Crichton said that isn’t the case. “Michael was always working on things,” she said.

While Crichton and her team were working in a file system they dubbed “The Brain” — the vast archive of materials they had found among his things — they happened upon something unusual, and undiscovered.

The file didn’t have a name or label. Sherri turned to her assistant and asked, “Can we open that one?” She was aware that they needed to keep everything up-to-date and properly classified. The assistant said sure, they could. And they did.

Sherri was astonished. Michael Crichton had charted his entire life — when he was born, when he graduated high school, when he graduated Harvard, when he graduated medical school and on and on, including when he got his last haircut. The Brain, as they called it, contained Michael Crichton’s life story.

Then she made an even more remarkable discovery — the document was still updating, even though Crichton has now been gone for more than 15 years. When he created the document, he must have factored in automation and where he would be, years later — it was still tracking dates and birthdays and anniversaries.

“It just gave me chills, because the archive is still very much alive,” she said. “Everything that you’ve created is still taking its turn.”

What new secrets will Crichton’s vast digital stronghold reveal? And how many of those secrets will be repurposed and turned into new bestsellers?

Time will tell. “There’s so many jewels in there,” Sherri said.

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