TERRE HAUTE — Former Terre Haute South Vigo English teacher Craig Smith, who used to teach his high-school students classical spine tinglers such as Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” when he was on the school’s faculty in the 1970s, is now successfully creating his own nail-biters. His most recent novel, “The Painted Messiah,” is “A blistering action thriller!” in the opinion of its English publishing house, Myrmidon Books.

“If you get your hands on [The Painted Messiah], put the oven gloves on and sit on an inflatable cushion because I got paper friction burns on my fingers and pressure sores elsewhere because I could barely move until I’d finished it,” said Dovegreyreader’s literary blog in their Feb. 13 review.

The novel is about a painting of Jesus made from life that turns up in modern times in Switzerland. A legend is connected with the painting: After the “scourging,” Pilate commanded that his victim be painted from life.

Somewhere, the painting survives, the only true image of Christ, granting the gift of everlasting life to whoever possesses it.

“I got the idea to write the novel about ten years ago, long before Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ was published,” said Smith, who has lived in Lucerne, Switzerland, since 1993 with his Swiss-born wife Martha.

“I was reading ‘The Other Bible’, a collection of sacred Jewish and Christian writings, when I ran across the mention of an early Christian writer named Irenaeus, who claimed a group of people called the Carpocratians possessed a painting of Christ ‘made by Pilate when our Lord walked among us.’ They believed, according to Irenaeus, that those who adored this image would stay forever young and never taste death.

“From the moment I read the passage I knew wanted to write a novel about that painting and its legend. I saw it as something of a cross between Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and Spielberg’s ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. To me, the ideal thriller keeps the pages turning, but when you finish, you’ve got something to think about.”

The research for such a project was daunting, but Smith embarked on a multi-year odyssey of researching everything he could find about early Christianity, the activities of the Romans in occupied Jerusalem, and the subject of iconography.

He did this with the confidence that he could sell a novel on the world stage. His first published novel, “The Whisper of Leaves” — the story of a serial killer who stalks his prey on a Midwestern college campus — had been well received in Britain and Germany, and, when released by Southern Illinois University Press in the United States, won the bronze medal (third in the nation) in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year awards in 2002.

During Smith’s research for “The Painted Messiah,” he came across “The Holy Blood, The Holy Grail,” a book offering a wealth of fact, legend, theory and speculation. One group the book discussed in detail was the Knights Templar — an order of knights originally sworn to protect Christian pilgrims during the times of the Crusades around 1100 A.D.

A variety of accounts or legends said the Knights possessed a great secret. In the imaginative hands of Smith, the secret they came to possess was based on a kernel of truth— in 525 A.D., in the cosmopolitan Middle Eastern city of Edessa, which had been built by Alexander the Great, a painting of Jesus was found buried in its fortifications. The painting became known as the Holy Face of Edessa. For centuries it was venerated as the True Image.

In real life it is unknown what happened to the Edessa image of Jesus, but in Smith’s imagination the painting eventually falls into the hands of the Knights Templar. After the fall of the Templars in 1307, the painting ends up in the Vatican archives for almost 500 years before it is brought to Paris by Napoleon and placed in Arsenal Library under the control of men dedicated to mastering the black arts. At this point Smith’s “painted Messiah” comes into the possession of the fictional family of Sir Julian Corbeau, a fugitive financier holed up in Switzerland to avoid extradition to the United States.

As the novel opens, two thieves break into Corbeau’s estate and steal his prized possession. A few months later, a prominent American televangelist J.W. Richland arranges to buy the painting and have it smuggled into the United States by retired CIA agent Thomas Malloy. The trouble begins when Julian Corbeau learns of the plan and attempts to reclaim his painting and have his revenge on all parties involved in the theft during the course of a single afternoon. In the ensuing pages, the bullets fly, buildings burn, and the body count rises.

At day’s end, Corbeau just misses getting the painting back, but manages to kidnap two women, whom he hopes to use as bargaining chips. But when the two thieves unite with Thomas Malloy, Corbeau gets more than he bargains for.

“I wanted to write a book that reflects the corruption that comes when we turn objects into God — and yet I didn’t want to moralize,” said Smith. “The trick was to show the issue as a choice: how does a character choose between the face of God and the person he loves? What sins are permissible when we are on God’s side?”

Perhaps the ultimate question in the novel is this: Why would Pilate order his slave to make such a painting?

To answer that question, Smith says, he decided he had to tell two stories simultaneously. In the historic narrative, “I attempt to tell the story of the Crucifixion from a Roman perspective. My portrayal of Pontius Pilate is based on the actual historic accounts of his 10 years in Jerusalem, but the decision to execute Jesus is motivated by political infighting that was going on in Rome. In my telling of the story, the death of Jesus is supposed to ignite a war (like the one that actually happened 40 years after the death of Jesus). This would have been to the advantage of the second most powerful man in Rome and forced Tiberius to adopt him as his heir and successor. But things don’t quite work out as planned for the conspirators. When he is told to execute Jesus, Pilate understands he must do it, but also knows he will be the first casualty of the war. He therefore follows his orders to the letter but arranges to make it look like the Jews killed Jesus. Thus everything happens exactly as we read it in the Gospel accounts, but the Jews are blamed for the death of Jesus — not the Romans who wanted to unseat Tiberius. Because of Pilate’s ruse, the expected war does not occur, and the conspirators in Rome — all actual personages — are all dead within a year of the Crucifixion.

Do the stories tie together at some level other than the painting? Is there an underlying unity not at first imagined? “Each reader will have to make that decision?” Smith says, “but for me that is the final mystery of the story. After all, the legend says those who look upon the True Image shall stay forever young and never taste death … ”

Harriet McNeal, a retired art history professor at Indiana State University, has known Smith since he was a teacher at Terre Haute South.

“Craig has worked for years on his research for this novel,” she said. “I was amazed how things he came into contact with in his daily life could stimulate his imagination. I visited him and Martha at the time when he was just toying with the idea of writing this story. We all went hiking in the Swiss mountains and at one point, when we caught sight of nearby Mount Pilatus, he told me about the local legend that Pontius Pilate was buried there. A few years later I read the same story in the novel!” McNeal has actually read several early drafts of this novel as well as a number of other of Smith’s novels. “He keeps working his prose until it is just what he wants. He’s not easily satisfied,” she says. “He’s a real craftsman.”

Smith credits the start of his career as a novelist to his father’s encouragement — or bribery — to read while he was still in grade school. Smith grew up in Vigo County and, on his father’s side, he can trace his roots back for four generations. He went to Lost Creek Elementary and then to Indiana State lab school for grades 7 through 12.

“I wasn’t very enthusiastic about reading when I was about 10 or so,” Smith admits. “I much preferred being out in the woods or playing sports, so my dad offered me 50 cents for every book I read. I started reading a lot.

“I was 18 when I wrote my first novel. It was about 300 pages long, and I wrote it in four months. I haven’t read it since I was 18.”

The writing bug just would not leave Smith alone.

Don Jennermann, a retired ISU humanities professor, remembers first meeting Smith in one of his classes: “Craig was just starting in college. One day he told me that he had already written three novels. I was extremely impressed — though I didn’t show it.”

Smith took a teaching job at Terre Haute South after getting his undergraduate degree.

“During the school years when I worked at South, I generally got up at three in the morning and wrote until six o’clock, Smith recalled. In the summertime, I took the whole day to write. In my free time, I loved to read.”

In the early 1980s, Smith returned to ISU to do master’s work in humanities. According to Jennermann, who was his thesis adviser, “Craig had a promising academic career with a great many academic publications to his credit but writing fiction was his first love, and he never quit working at it. I’m really pleased with his success.”

From ISU, Smith went to Southern Illinois University to work on his doctorate. While studying, he returned to Terre Haute in the summers and had what he feels was probably the most important professional experience of his life outside of the classroom: working as a salesman at the former Dietrich Buick on Wabash Avenue.

“I got fired by Dan Dietrich the first summer I worked for him,” recalled Smith. “I wrote a short story about the experience, and a few months later one day I saw him in town and asked him if I could show him the story. Dan agreed to see it, and he really liked it — I think because he was the hero of the story.

“When I went back to him the next summer to ask for a job, I not only got hired, we became pretty good friends. I ended up working for him for seven summers while I was in graduate school. Being a car salesman was an education in human psychology. Every type of person shows up on a car lot sooner or later. I still draw from those experiences when I create characters.”

After Smith received his doctorate in English, he taught English for several years at the University of Northern Colorado, where he won multiple awards for outstanding teaching and scholarship.

There, slowly but surely, his love for fiction writing led him away from an academic career. He left America to go to Switzerland with his wife and to devote himself full time to writing novels.

Smith has sold the foreign language rights to “The Painted Messiah” to Germany, Italy and Greece. He is currently looking for an American distributor. He hopes eventually to publish a series of novels about the relics of the Passion showing up in modern times.

Up next, he says, is the story of the Messiah’s lance.