King Solomon's Mines

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King Solomon's Mines
"To those who enter the hall of the dead, evil comes" (Walter Paget, 1888)
Written by: H. Rider Haggard
Central Theme:
Synopsis:
Genre(s): Jungle Opera, Lost World
First published: 1885
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King's Solomon's Mines is an adventure novel by H. Rider Haggard, first published in 1885. It tells of a group of Englishmen who travel into Darkest Africa in search of the legendary diamond mines of The Bible's King Solomon.

It was enormously successful, launching the Jungle Opera genre, and was followed by over a dozen sequels and prequels featuring the protagonist Allan Quatermain, including a crossover with Haggard's other most famous novel, She. It has been adapted for film and television many times.

Tropes used in King Solomon's Mines include:

Haggard's sequels and prequels provide examples of:

Adaptations provide examples of:

  • Improbable Hairstyle: Elizabeth Curtis from the Deborah Kerr adaptation gets sick of her waist length hair in the humid African jungle and hacks a slice out of it. When it cuts to the next scene she has cut it short into a perfectly styled short do. That style might have been fashionable in the 1950s when the film came out but the film is set in the 1800s when women didn't have short hair. Test audiences actually laughed their heads off at the scenes when they first saw them that the producers nearly removed them. But they couldn't explain Elizabeth's change of hairstyle so they kept the improbable scenes in the film.
  • Throw-Away Guns: Parodied in the 1985 comedy/adventure film adaptation. The female character throws a gun at the villain; he shouts: "Thank you!" and uses it to blast away at her.
  • Token Romance: Every single adaptation of King Solomon's Mines manages to shoehorn in a white female love interest who wasn't in the book.
  • Tree-Top Town: In the version with Richard Chamberlain they meet a tribe of people who live entirely in the trees, never touching the ground.