Review | You can see future success in Michael Crichton’s third posthumous novel
Dragon Teeth, about rival palaeontologists in the Wild West of the 1870s, is no Jurassic Park, but it’s an arresting curiosity that points at what was to come
by Michael Crichton (read by Scott Brick)
HarperCollins
Michael Crichton could lay a strong claim to being the most successful writer of his generation, scoring major hits on television (ER) and in cinemas (Jurassic Park). Written in the 1970s, Dragon Teeth is the third posthumous Crichton novel to be published. Set in the Wild West in the 1870s, it follows the mad pursuits of William Johnson, a buccaneering young adventurer who sacrifices a Grand Tour of Europe to search for dinosaur fossils with real-life palaeontologist Othniel Marsh. While Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World is an obvious source, Marsh’s rivalry with Edward Cope is another. And while the seeds of later success can be seen, the story lacks the matured thrills of Jurassic Park the novel. An arresting curiosity, with an afterword read by Crichton’s widow, Sherri.