Twelve months ago, Dad had passed away while an electronic experiment he was conducting went wrong. James remembered the flash and how his elderly father was thrown across the room. He’d rushed to his father’s aide as he lay on the floor, but Dad had become silent and slipped away before the ambulance had arrived. It was therefore with great trepidation that James opened the door at the top of the attic stairs and entered Dad’s workshop. Holding back the tears, he cautiously walked over to the test-bench and peered at the mass of cables and coils exactly as Dad had left them. Had he really been on the verge of a great scientific discovery?

 

It was with some trepidation that James opened the door at the top of the stairs and entered his dad’s workshop. The door hadn’t been opened in nine months since the night his dad had died and it felt like walking into a grave. James had been asked to clear the room so that Mum, who couldn’t bear to clear it herself, could move into a flat. It was only by coincidence that James had been there when his dad was electrocuted. He was taking him up a coffee and something to eat. Dad had been too engrossed in his work even to appear for meals, which was completely out of character. Maybe he really had been on the brink of a major scientific discovery that night that he died.

 

Why can't you just start with his father dying? Then cut to the future with some transition like "James wouldn't open the attic door again until, nine months after he'd watched his father lowered into the ground, his mum asked if he would clear the workshop out...." Then immediately into him entering the attic and what he finds there. At this point, you could have James wonder whether or not his dad was on the verge of a discovery without having to launch into backstory.

[This message has been edited by apeiron (edited February 19, 2006).]