Details, Details, Inspiration and Details! by Sara Lansing

The inspiration that springs to mind today is one close to my would-be rev-head's heart.

Aussie sporting icon Kevin Bartlett, October 1982. "Hardy's Heroes," the grid-place qualifier on the Saturday before the James Hardy 1000, Australia's greatest motor sport event, at Mount Panorama, Bathrust, NSW. Now I'd always been a Ford fancier, watching Alan Moffat and his team send those big Falcons growling round the circuit, but the Chevy Camaro had a touch of the exotic, they were rare down here and still are. I was just wrapt, to hear that race-massaged mill snarl round the mountain and come flying down the longest straight in the southern hemisphere, dropping through the S'es so savagely you could see the chassis actually twist. Here she is, in all her glory:

I was in heaven, and have lusted for a Z-28 or a Trans-Am ever since. Not that I've ever afforded one, and with gas prices as they are, it's unlikely I ever will. And of curse this one was a memory the same day, she ended up on her roof high on Mount Panorama early in the race in one of the race's historic mis-haps.

But that inspiration never left me, and while I've used muscle cars in stories before, I was delighted to indulge myself and finally use a classic third-generation F-body Chev in my new novel Road's End. Sure, there's an inevitable comparison to Mad Max in the sense that it is a post-catastrophe story set in Aus, but the similarity really ends there. And the Chev gets a run instead of the Falcon. I had a lot of fun with maps plotting the route for my heroine, matching the Chev's fuel consumption to the amount of juice she could stockpile and depot to get from A to B and back again, and to realistically manage the stresses on what is, unavoidably, a very old engine being asked to do heavy work.

That's a cornerstone of my approach, credibility. While I don't claim to have always matched reality with the needs of the story (can a 1981 Suzuki 650 really do 130mph? Only downhill with a tailwind!) I have at least made an effort to get the details right. I did market research in the action genre a generation ago, I enjoyed Don Pendleton's work, and that of his ghost writers (John W, Jennison was one, I'm positive, I'd know his smooth, competent, always-tactile style anywhere), and I remember being very disappointed when ghost writers of much lesser skill took over from Jack Hild on the Soldiers of Barabas pulp action novels around #21 of the series, back in the 80s. Jack Hild got his military details spot on, he had hardware do what it was meant to and nothing else. But one of the ghost writers had a scenario with the mercenaries on an island in the Bering Sea (Sakhalin Breakout, here's the cover, a crappy download, if I ever find my copy I'll get a better one)

and the Russians place a standing patrol over them ... of MiG-25s! Which after hours upon hours of loiter over target, performed a ground attack! My eyes rolled into my head at that point for the sheer, dumb wrongness of the choice. A mach 3 interceptor which guzzles fuel faster than almost any other plane ever built, and is optimised for high-mach running in the thin air, armed only with air to air missiles. The writer should have chosen Su-25 close-support planes, designed to do the job, but that requires actually browsing through a reference book, which seemed to be too much to ask the writer to do. I guess getting the numbers right was just right enough to do, and the publisher was interested in getting the installment into the shops on time, not what it contained (symptomatic of the industry... The series ended about half a dozen titles later, the ghost writers were unreadably bad at the finish, at least one had a narrative that sounded like chinglish.)

We're all guilty of getting details wrong, and I'm the first to admit there is a balance between detail finesse and the time and effort it takes to complete a piece. But sometimes the effort really can be worthwhile. I remember once needing to know how to immobilise a British machine gun so a character in a novel I did with Barb Jones could do just that -- knock out the guncrew, then immobilise the weapon. I ended up chatting with a British squaddie and learned that you could remove the bolt or firing pin or some such, being wary of a spring or clip or something that would fly out through the breach in the process. I was very happy to write in that real detail, even though in this instance the probability of anyone reading it actually knowing that the detail was real was pretty remote. But I knew, and it felt good to have it right.

In the same spirit, I've tried to get my Chevy details right in Road's End, and I hope I've managed it. It's sure been fun to write about the snarl of that V-8 and the bite of big tyres on the country highways of Victoria in a strange, ruined future... Ah, be still my rev-head heart!

When can you read it? When it's finished, and that'll be a while yet.

Ciao, Sara