Ian Wilson: When mystery drowns history

Ian Wilson, 60, was raised in Bristol and was working in marketing at the Bristol Evening Post in 1978 when he translated his private interest in the Turin Shroud into an international bestseller.

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Ian Wilson, 60, was raised in Bristol and was working in marketing at the Bristol Evening Post in 1978 when he translated his private interest in the Turin Shroud into an international bestseller. His screenplay Silent Witness, based on the book, won a Bafta. He gave up his day job and concentrated on writing. In 1984 his book Jesus: the evidence, and the accompanying ITV series, provoked much criticism in church circles for its debunking of the traditional view of the Gospels. His subsequent books have taken similarly iconoclastic stances and include Shakespeare: the evidence, The Columbus Myth and The Bible Is History. In 1998 he revisited his best-known subject with The Blood and the Shroud, which attempted to rebut carbon-dating tests that had shown the cloth to be of medieval origin. His new book, Before the Flood, is published by Orion. Six years ago, Ian Wilson and his wife emigrated to Australia, and they have settled in Brisbane.

Here's a tried and trusted publishing recipe. Pick an ancient riddle to unravel. Mix together a pinch of history, a splash of archaeology, a soupçon of theology, lashings of first-person travelogue and a hefty dose of maps. Then flavour it with talk of the pyramids, the Inca sacred sites, the truth behind the Bible and obstructive, conspiratorial clerics. Finally, garnish in a bold cover with gold letters and a sensational title about a lost civilisation, a missing continent or extra-terrestrial life. Watch the copies walk out of the bookshops.

However identifiable the ingredients may be, no one can quite agree on a name for this bestselling dish. Marketing people call it "religious mystery" as they seek serialisation deals with tabloids. The authors talk about "historical investigations" or "personal quests" as they peddle the implausible on chat shows. Academic reviewers scoff at "fiction dressed as fact".

Ian Wilson, the gently spoken Bristolian sitting opposite me in a hotel lounge in central London, does not have any strong preference about these labels. He refers to how such titles – including a long and impressive backlist of his own books – are displayed in Waterstone's under the bland banner "Mind, Body and Spirit". Even though he has a new volume to promote – this time, seeking out the truth behind the biblical story of Noah's Ark – Wilson evidently feels he can afford to adopt the neutral stance of an elder statesman. It's not just that he has taken on the famously laid-back attitude of his adoptive home, Australia. Wilson knows his place is secure as one of the godfathers of a genre that has matured into a world-beater.

When, in the early 1970s, he became convinced that a little-known shroud in Turin was the cloth in which the dead body of Jesus had been wrapped, he approached various London publishers. " 'No one is interested in relics these days, old chap,' they told me. 'Forget it.' " But he didn't and, ultimately, he was proved right. Eventually, an American publisher saw the light.

The Turin Shroud sold by the bucket-load, and Wilson remains much in demand around the globe as a lecturer on the subject. When, in 1984, he followed up that breakthrough with Jesus: the evidence, which accompanied a TV series and laid bare for a popular readership the shortcomings of the Bible as historical record, his reputation as an iconoclast was made.

Yet, of late, Wilson has suffered something of an eclipse in the territory that he carved out. It's the fate of all pioneers to be overtaken by a host of Johnny-come-latelys. In Wilson's case, the usurper was the ex-Economist journalist Graham Hancock, whose The Sign and the Seal (1992) and Fingerprints of the Gods (1995) were so successful that they have become the benchmark against which all others in the field judge themselves. Hancock was even given his own Channel 4 series to promote his ever-more-far-fetched discoveries.

Wilson has continued turning out new books, though none has matched the impact and acclaim of his first two. When I mention Hancock's name, I clearly touch a nerve. Wilson becomes animated. Even the quiff of mousey hair on top of his head starts moving. He is, he makes abundantly clear, not a fan of Hancock's, or indeed of any of the others who have taken what he sees as a sensationalist course.

"I certainly wouldn't want my name to be associated with a lot of what I now see coming out," he insists. "People may use the same basic approach as me, but they have gone out on wild tangents. And I view with horror the way Graham Hancock has gone. The Sign and the Seal was intriguing, and a lot in it was highly plausible, but since then he has gone way out into the stratosphere. It is a shame that people have to do that. Yes, I will take controversial subjects, but only if I believe them to be genuine. I research them to the best of my ability and come up with sincere conclusions. That's the only way I can work."

By implication, Wilson seems to suggest that Hancock et al are insincere and playing to the gallery. He is too polite to spell it out but recalls another brush with a publisher. "After The Turin Shroud, I was interested in doing a book about people recalling past lives. There was a lot of it around then. If they were genuine, they would have been rewriting history. That, of course, was the conclusion I would have liked to have found. Livia Gollancz, my British publisher, told me that if I came out in favour, she'd double my advance. It was tempting, but my research didn't justify it, so I couldn't and I didn't."

That episode demonstrates how hard it can be to safeguard your integrity in this lucrative publishing niche. At which point I ought to declare an interest. When I once strayed into it, investigating the medieval legend of Pope Joan, I encountered similar pressures to reach a headline-grabbing conclusion, but had to stand by the fact that the evidence justified only a question mark. I have, then, an instinctive sympathy with the line Ian Wilson is trying to walk.

There are, he argues, three distinct groups: at one extreme, academic historians and archaeologists, serving an audience of peers; at another, sensationalists chasing sales with only a "flakey" grasp of truth; and in between, writers such as him, popular but scrupulous, resisting the pressure for a happy ending.

The practicalities of this middle way are all there in his new book, Before the Flood (Orion, £18.99). On the plus side, there is impressive and dispassionate scholarship. It chronicles the existence of flood myths in most early civilisations, linked with the ending of the first Ice Age around 10,000-8,000BC, and the consequent rapid rise in sea levels. There is also a sure touch in making palatable for a general audience the results of ground-breaking academic research that would otherwise go unnoticed, save in senior common rooms.

Wilson details how the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution of Cape Cod, and its former director, Dr Robert Ballard, have revealed that about 600 feet below the current shoreline of the Black Sea is a submerged coastal shelf. There they found evidence of a sophisticated society drowned around 6000BC, when rising water levels in the Mediterranean carved out the Bosphorus Strait and flooded into what had previously been a freshwater lake.

So far, so good. Even sceptics would find it hard to dispute that Wilson presents a good case. From then on, though, the going gets harder as he tries to link the discovery first with the story of Noah and then with the mythical city of Atlantis. The Bible states that the ark was beached on Mount Ararat, not that far from the south coast of the Black Sea. There is no direct link, but Before the Flood contrives to make one. Wilson does, mercifully, pull back from suggesting that there were a real Mr and Mrs Noah who loved animals, so he is still at that point on the right side of the line.

But then he throws caution to the wind for a crowd-pleasing gesture. Speculating about the nature of this sunken civilisation on the shores of the Black Sea, he includes, almost casually, a chapter about the legend of the lost city of Atlantis. The book suddenly becomes a Disney dream-world.

"I wasn't entirely happy about putting that chapter in," he admits, "but I did it because it was valid. Plato says Atlantis was a civilisation that was drowned. So it has a relevance." But was there also one eye on the strap-line: "The book that located Atlantis"? "It wasn't a commercial decision or pressure from my publishers," Wilson says firmly but defensively. "And to be fair to the readers, I do point out that we can never know conclusively."

I am inclined to give Ian Wilson the benefit of the doubt. As he points out a little too often, he is a trained historian (though the training turns out to be as a history undergraduate at Oxford). More important, there is his evident sincerity in an area where that quality is at a premium. In the course of writing The Turin Shroud, for instance, he became so close to his subject that he abandoned his lifelong atheism and became a Catholic. It is hard to imagine some of the young pretenders taking what they write that seriously.