Diamonds - The Rush of '72 by Sam North

Welcome:
I’m going to take you through three research case studies.

The first begins with a page in a history book: The Americans by Daniel Boorstin in fact. Just one page, a small footnote really in America’s story. A start of a long journey for me, though I didn’t know it at the time. It tells of the Great Diamond Rush on 1872 and its two discoverers John Slack and Philip Arnold. Two relatively simple men, prospectors from the day they abandoned their Kentucky farms and headed West to find gold. Thirteen years later they pitch up in the history books rubbing shoulders with celebrities and a man running for President, newspaper mogul Horace Greeley.
An extract:
‘From the moment John Slack had read to him details of the great diamond discoveries in Kimberley, South Africa, Arnold had become obsessed. Whatever Africa had, surely America, rich in every mineral imaginable, would have as well? It was just awaiting discovery.
Slack wasn't so sure. Between them both they'd dug over every last inch of Nevada and California and found no sign of anything but traces of gold or silver; or nothing. There had been plenty of nothing.
Yet, despite their hope and determination, by the winter of I87I, Arnold and Slack had become destitute. They didn't even possess a mule. The leather on their backs was cracked and soiled; their boots had long ago given up any semblance of shape or waterproofing. They had had the fever all right and it was a terrible, cussed ol’ bug that had bitten them good and wasn’t about to let go.’

Extraordinary names leap out from their story. Charles Tiffany in New York, William Ralston the chief cashier of the Bank of California, Asbury Harpending who has street in San Francisco named after him, as well as General Colton who ran the railroad but was more famous for leading a cavalry charge against striking miners. There were others and swiftly I knew that there was more than just one page of history here.
I was lucky, I had just been paid for a TV script so I invested the money in a research trip to San Francisco for six months, little realising that this story would also take me to New York and finally back to London.

If you are ever going to choose to write about history, you have to think of it as if it were the present. Just as we are now fascinated by Russian billionaires flashing the money they have expropriated from the Russian people and personality obsessed politicians and ruthless newspaper moguls who seem to control world opinion through all the papers and TV they own. It was absolutely no different then, a little less TV perhaps, but if you ever thought ‘media’ was a modern invention, the plethora of newspapers and scandal sheets back then was astonishing. Libel was still enforced by duels. 1872, I discovered was a pretty exciting time to be in America.

One of the key snags I found as I began my research was there was certainly a lot of material about millionaires, bankers, the politicians and stockbrokers and even some of the clerks and assorted dogsbodies who hung around them, but about my two protagonists, the outsiders, hardly a sausage and what there was wasn’t flattering. I knew where they came from, how at least one of them died and the name of a woman they ‘shared’. But what history records are the rich and the males who write it. Women, ethnic people, children and my guys in particular hardly a damn word.

For future historical novelists writing about the present, they will find blogs of overwhelming trivial details of just about every single person on the planet. They may well find it hard to penetrate six billion souls and make meaning out it, but the information will be there.

I followed my story down the primary print resource pipe, looking for all the points of contact my heroes made with the famous of the time. Slowly I had the names of everyone involved, the amounts spent and gained, even disputed bills in hotels and various descriptions of the diamond find. For the details of how they spoke or how they lived or their morals, I would have to look elsewhere.

Immediately I began to dig, the story constantly grew wider and I found myself in Sacramento, then Nevada, Silver City and it became obvious that so many of the other characters were equally colourful, evidenced because someone had bothered to write it all down. I became slightly resentful that I wasn’t writing about them.

And indeed this is one of the traps of research. It is axiomatic that whomever you are writing about, you will immediately find two others who are much more interesting. William Hague recently said the same about his biography of William Pitt that in writing it, the story of William Wilberforce, Pitt’s friend, became so much more interesting and he realised he’d have to write another book. (The 100 grand advance may have also had something to do with that).

In my book Diamonds- The Rush of ’72 for example it features the banker William Chapman Ralston. He started life as an apprentice to a Captain on the Mississippi Riverboat Gambling vessels, where he no doubt learned a few tricks about honesty. At least two showboats caught fire and sank but he survived to become a Captain of a new vessel at a very young age. When gold was discovered out West he, like everyone else wanted to head on out there to become a prospector, but he was persuaded that there was more money to made ferrying passengers from Mexican territory to what was then the fishing village of San Francisco. Somewhere along the way he got his name onto a small business that traded gold bullion and four years later he became an important banker in San Francisco. By the time my two prospectors deposited their diamonds in the Bank of California, he not only runs the bank but also is de facto the king of California and lives in a mansion with 187 bedrooms all lit by gas. The only such dwelling in the west. He lives like Napoleon, has controlling interests in every gold and silver mine and is building the largest and most modern hotel in the world – one that just had to have an entrance large enough for him to drive a coach and four through it. Annoyingly my characters paled into insignificance. They were just two totally broke, grizzled prospectors and he; Ralston was the damn ringmaster of a new financial world.

But Ralston set out to seduce them, promise Arnold and Slack all his contacts and marketing skills, in return he gets one third of their claim, worth millions for nothing more than the price of dinner in a swanky restaurant. Ralston appears in many history books. There are descriptions of his home, the fabulous dinners, his investments in vineyards and how he used his mansion to intimidate everyone. Including our prospectors, who went there, swam in his vast indoor Italian marble pool, rode his horses, admired the gold pegs for the harnesses and thought that they too could live like Napoleon if they played their cards right.

But do you really think a banker like that is going to let them get rich? He sends them back into the mountains whilst he sets up a company to exploit the diamonds, involving every key man in the city. He also dispatches a spy to follow them so he can buy up all the land around the claim and squeeze them out of it. Where this diamond bearing mesa actually was, with its vermillion flowers was complicated because the protagonists continually lied about the exact location to throw people off the scent. The last thing they wanted was people to actually know where the diamonds where. Persuaded to do just that by Ralston they led a blindfolded General Colton across whole mountain ranges to confuse him and by accident discovered his spy, which is where he met his death.

So in just one character, Ralston, lies danger. Much is known, he is colourful and he lives like a King. But this is where you have to have discipline. It isn’t his story. Maybe next time, but right now its Arnold and Slacks story and I had to stay on course. But as I researched, even more colourful characters were unearthed and suddenly one gains an insight into how people really lived in those times and what extraordinary freedoms and few restraints they had and how each new character seems to deserve at least half a book on their own count.
In any research one document leads to another and they pile up. A six months journey easily becomes a year and then suddenly you are imagining a luncheon in the Strand with Baron Rothschild and Asbury Harpending as they discuss the contents of the longest cable ever sent by none other than my banker William Ralston from San Francisco and the topic is none other than Arnold and Slack. A connection. Though no one thought to keep it.

Back in New York, we have to play the Tiffany card. We discover divisions in our characters, a woman, Alyce, their confident and a former showgirl, is suddenly to be discarded. Sudden wealth can turn a man’s head and mean fresher, younger models, even then. Yet Slack feels honour bound to continue with her and give her money. We discover that Arnold is perhaps more reckless and Slack strait-laced. I must ask why? And come back to that point in a moment.

It is suddenly exciting, will they get their millions or be cheated? A million could buy anything in 1872. That’s research too. What will money buy you? How will two men who have never had any spend it? Who will they trust if they know they cannot trust bankers? It is perhaps easier to imagine life in the mountains, it’s tough and often ruthless and harsh, there was no health and safety officer to prevent you grazing your knee back then. Life in New York in 1872, what was it like? The novelist Edith Wharton might help, but it’s your job to bring it to life and assume nothing.

Horrible mistakes can be made thinking a man might catch a train from Manhattan to San Francisco at that time. They could not. In fact trains did not go from Manhattan Island or arrive in San Francisco city. One can take nothing for granted. Remember also that this is a nation in the thrall of rebuilding itself and all the new things are before them, a brilliant future and optimism is everywhere. Even the poorest immigrant is an optimist for a while and this had better be reflected in your writing. They don’t know of troubles ahead, of bank failures or stock crashes.

Diamonds for me was a journey of assembled facts and places and people but all that has to be merged into the background. It isn’t the story, no matter how forceful some characters or situations might appear. One has to remember why it was you were attracted to the story in the first place and rekindle that enthusiasm. One recorded incident in one of the characters published autobiography helped enormously. He had met the protagonists earlier, when they were prospecting gold and reported some conversations he’d had and dealings. Suddenly you are aware that these men weren’t the strangers you once thought and besides people settled the wilderness, got to know each other and it was still a small community of good and hard luck stories. Everyone it seemed set out to get rich in California but hardly anyone save the bankers and lawyers turned out that way. As true then as now.

One can easily walk away from a goldmine as well. Dismiss someone just because they aren’t central to your story. Take for example: Alyce Wentworth the wronged woman. Not rich, not famous, but begins as Arnold and Slack’s landlady and Arnold’s lover. There was virtually nothing about her written down and well, who writes about landladies? To dismiss her would have been a big mistake. So easy to do if there is little recorded about her. All I really knew for sure was that she was dumped by Arnold in New York in the summer of 1872.

I was researching in Silver City, Nevada. Trying to find traces of their earlier existence. I met an old lady of 80 who was manning the post-card stand in a run down mining museum. We got talking (and here’s a tip, talk to everyone, you’ll be amazed how helpful people can be), and she said she had been married twice but her maiden name was Clay but it could have been Slack. My ears pricked up and suddenly I was buying her lunch and I leaned all about her grandmother Alyce Wentworth. She knew little about her being a landlady, what she did know that her grandmother lived in Brooklyn, New York and married a man called Henry Clay. Seemingly no connection at all to my Alyce. However her grandmother had written a book in 1905, which was never published. She had that dusty hand-written manuscript lying on a shelf at home and she let me read it. She watched me the whole time in case I ran off with it, she didn’t want it to leave the house nor allow me to photocopy it. She had only glanced at the writing once, as a child, and found it hard to read, but it was her most treasured possession. I had to read it there and then and buy her dinner as well. In it, however, was the real story of the Great Diamond Rush of 1872.

Alyce was abandoned by her father in New Orleans when she was twelve. He left her with a family and went to make his fortune in Californian gold with the fifty-niners. Five years later her father had written to say he was rich from money he’d made in the civil war and that she should join him. But she was a dancer in a music hall by now and resented him deeply. She didn’t go. She’d met a prospector come home to Orleans to spent his fortune and he’d fallen for her. He went back to California and wrote to her enclosing a gold ring and some money for her to join him. He was building her a house on an acre of land across the bay from San Francisco and she was young and it seemed the right thing to do. She went – she was to be married to him in San Francisco on June 12th. By the time she got there, June 10th, there was a cable waiting for her at the Grand hotel. He was dead, killed in a mining accident back in Silver City. Been dead a month already before she’d even received his letter and sent one back accepting. She had a house, but no money and at the age of 18 became a landlady. The next prospectors who came into her life were Philip Arnold and John Slack. They promised her a fortune and she believed them, even though they never once paid her a cent in rent.

I could easily have overlooked that the landlady was important to the story. But that’s the beauty of research, whether by accident or design, how much to include or accept her point of view is another thing entirely. But it provided an excellent counterweight to the official version of their story.

That’s the problem with research. You will find material that takes you off in every direction but the one you should be going. How do you discipline yourself? How do you take from the research and incorporate the new, exciting stuff without it swamping or contradicting your story? Stick to the facts? Or get lost in the wilderness? Sorting out the best of what you unearth and using it appropriately is tough but always go back to why you were fascinated in the first place.

And write. Some people say you should just write and do the research afterwards. I am not one of those. I firmly believe that the research is the pleasurable bit of writing. All that reading and the excitement of finding out something new. But one good way to control it is to construct a timeline of events and people. That way you have a visual aide to your literary journey. It is also a way to see what to discard as some facts will be interesting but will lead you to dead ends.
A map, if you will, of your book will emerge.

The Curse of the Nibelung – A Sherlock Holmes Mystery On to Case Study two: You approach writing a Sherlock Holmes with caution. It came out of a conversation with my publisher and speculating about what Holmes was like as an old man. Before you know it we had shook hands on me writing just that. It was 1939. Holmes at 87, Watson at 83. Holmes was back in Baker Street, bored of bees. England was approaching its darkest hour and the sleuths await the call to duty, even though they are by now forgotten men. A device was needed to get them up and running and it is another forgotten man Winston Churchill, not yet Prime Minister at this time who comes to their rescue with a mystery. Four spies have perished trying to get a devastating secret back to the England. He wants them both to pose as Nazi sympathisers, go to Germany and find that secret.

An extract: ‘You see before you Winston, not two old decrepit fools, but men ignored by their country in a time of need; men who saw a time would come, sooner or later, when that country would turn to them, reach out and grasp for men of proven experience in matters criminal and politic. We decided some months ago that we had to come to terms with Herr Hitler, grow to understand him and the German people. We began to live a German life, absorb German thinking and thus hope to reach into the minds of those who would seek to control our destiny.’
Winston put down his whisky and breathed a sigh of relief. With Holmes back in the picture, England might yet be saved.

Even though they all know their lives are totally expendable. Holmes leaps at the chance, well, alright, staggers to it and finally they will be able to do one last thing for King and Country.

For Holmes purists the Detective is always associated with late Victorian and Edwardian times, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was ever fascinated by politics, inventions and all manner of modern things. He may have retired Holmes but Holmes has a life and will of his own and he may never retire.

We have all seen so many war movies we think we know what life was like in London in 1939. But what was life like in Germany in 1939? That was my research.
I already had a vision of Holmes in my head from all those Basil Rathbone and Nigel West films. It may not be fashionable now, but when I grew up I watched them all and Holmes for me was always dashing about in cars, using telephones, living in the world of the early 1940’s, mostly in Washington DC it seemed to me at the time. When I finally got around to reading him as written by Doyle I was surprised to find him dashing about in coaches and living a very Victorian life in a rather formal England. I imagine it must be equally hard now to start reading James Bond and discover that he has been around for sixty years already.

So, Germany, 1939. What is the mindset? Completely different to England for certain.
Here, though people talked tough, they must have been afraid. In Germany they were certain of victory and how soon they will control all or most of the world and remake it in their fashion. For Holmes, an icon of England to change sides would be flattering for them, but not unexpected, after all a certain Edward, lately royal had shown similar interests and better to choose sides at the beginning than the end. It would hand them a useful propaganda weapon they could exploit. For Holmes it is a risky strategy indeed.

France has still not fallen; the phoney war is in place. There is a chance to get Holmes into France, then into Germany by invitation. But plainly if they are 87 and 83 respectively we would need a foil, a sidekick, someone to help with motability, to use a horrid new word. So enter nurse Cornelia, a pretty nurse of course and she would be secretly an intelligence officer, though naturally a niece of an influential man.
But now they would have someone to act as eyes and ears.

The story is set in Nuremberg, the very heartland of Nazi culture and where does the plot come from, nothing less than a tin of chocolate biscuits, a souvenir of the war from my father who’d been a pilot in the war. Apparently biscuit factories were spared bombing, as their significance in keeping the war going had not been thoroughly recognised. Holmes discovers the fatal secret that has killed so many and could kill so many more and he is acutely disappointed to discover that it is nothing more than a recipe for chocolate. Of course, he suspects there is something else to this mystery and pursues it to the bitter end.

Researching a period piece means you have to know the price of a room, the cost of food, rail timetables, width of roads, the types of cars, plumbing, restaurants menus, places of historical significance and political and social mor‘e’s. More importantly this mindset of Germany.
Baedekers is helpful, but not the end of the story. Research is not the novel. It is easy to get lost in the petty details to convince that particular reader who always seems to know more than you do. Pretty much anything you do they will find a hole to pick. But you can make sure that your locations are right that you don’t have Holmes and Watson checked into a hotel that was demolished in 1922 or driving happily up a one-way street. A post-war guidebook is useless; you have to find one from the exact year. You can use the local knowledge to give an impression of a place and enrich the atmosphere, but you need to move on, keep it going and don’t stop too much or too often to prove you know your stuff. The reader will assume you have done research and only lose faith with you if you make an obvious, terrible gaffe. Anything can trip you up. The wrong stamp on an envelope, a careless expression, some mention of a song that comes out the month after you have set an event. Someone will ALWAYS spot it and let you know. Clive James recently released a new memoir and all the reviews concentrated on was his German misspellings, nothing else at all.

Of course if you truly don’t know something and can’t Google it and it isn’t essential for the book, perhaps don’t write it. Someone will know and they’ll pick on that and only that. I struggled for ages to find out which way the door opened on a Hotchkiss saloon and wasn’t sure of what octane petrol was in ‘39. It became a lot lower later in the war for example. Sometimes finding out these little details can really throw you off your writing. Don’t let it. Write it. If is wrong, delete or change in the edit but always double check what you are not sure of. Assume nothing. In the age of the digital book, I am sure there will be some retrospective ‘fact-checking’ in many historical novels and of course if you are relying on Wickipedia, as my students do entirely, the information you get may not be right either.

You also have to remember in all historical fiction that your characters have absolutely no knowledge of the future, as far as Holmes knows, Germany may win. It is so easy to get lost in the detail, but fortunately for me all errors in ‘Curse of the Nibelung’ blame Watson if anything is wrong, after all it is he who is writing it up from his notes, not I. He may not recall the exact detail or two from time to time at 83.
But remember you are writing a novel, not a textbook. Don’t bore people to death with your research just because it took you a year to do it.
Holmes’s German is a bit shaky, but then so is he. Does Holmes solve the mystery and discover Hitler’s greatest secret, does he get out of Germany alive? For that you will have to read the book. Will there be another? I rather think not at age 89.

Which brings us to ‘Another Place to Die- the story of the next Great Flu Pandemic. Not then an historical novel. Nor is it science fiction, after all it may just be around the corner, this coming winter for example. You thought bird-flu had gone away because we had a mild winter, the initial panic has dissipated and I’m a schmuck for wasting two whole years researching a book that takes place in 2009. It was obviously a waste of time and shows the risk involved with speculative fiction. On the other hand you might well be in for a shock. This lull was exactly my point. They scared us and nothing happens. Anyone remember the iceberg in the AIDS advertisements twenty years ago? Scared straight came into fashion and condom sales raced ahead because everyone was going to die of HIV.

It didn’t happen here; eventually everyone went back to indiscriminate screwing ditched the condoms and now we have an epidemic of Chlamydia instead. Where the iceberg ad should have played was in Africa where yes millions are dying (37.5 million infected at this date) and every year it gets a lot worse, but because it is there and we are here, we try not to think about it.

And so it may be with a new influenza pandemic. We forget about it, ignore the warnings or just get bored by them, the anti-viral drugs get left in warehouses and suddenly we get a severe winter, bird-flu becomes HN51 all of a sudden and wham it is everywhere, we are overwhelmed and I was right all along but still no one is buying my book because you are dead already.

This is definitely a case where you have to get your research right. When I was writing this there was only one key book about the 1919 flu epidemic by Gina Kolata, now there is a library full of them. Everyone wants to discuss the last flu pandemic that killed millions across the globe. But right from the start I didn’t want to rewrite Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’ or indeed George R Stewart’s ‘Earth Abides’ when all but one man dies after an unnamed virus sweeps the globe. History tells us that indeed many always survive. That’s where my research began. Reading how others tackled the subject. Albert Camus with The Plague for example. The convenience of a walled city in a hot climate. You need survivors to bury the dead and someone to find a cure or all will die. In all, despair seemed to dominate and an apocalyptic vision rule. Nor did I envision a Mad Max situation. Life isn’t really like that. I hope.

Looking again at the 1919 pandemic you can see a pattern emerge. In Europe it followed returning troops from the battlefields of France and literally followed the railways lines and ports as troops were dispersed towards the end of the war. Town after town succumbed to the disease. Troopships took it around the globe. It was devastating and came without warning to places like Durban in South Africa. The influenza pandemic took place in three waves, starting in the northern spring and summer of 1918. Further research has seen the consistent upward revision of the estimated global mortality of the pandemic, which a 1920s calculation put in the vicinity of 21.5 million. A 1991 paper revised the mortality as being in the range 24.7-39.3 million. It could have been 50 million. However, even this vast figure may be substantially lower than the real toll, perhaps as much as 100 percent understated - a fifth of the world's population was infected. Many, in Asia for example, weren’t even counted in the global statistics.

Research was one thing, but what kind of story did I want to tell? One of those lone hero doctors who sees it coming and saves the whole world? Or terrorists get hold a virus and spread it around the world, only to be thwarted by Dr Harrison Ford of MIT Viral institute, who tragically infects his wife in the last moment and bids a tearful goodbye? Nah. Both these books actually exists already with terrorists to boot and besides Terry Gilliam already dealt with this in the excellent ‘Twelve Monkey’s' almost a decade ago now. Writing about the near future is fraught with difficulty because it’s a crowded market.

What my research told me was that when it happens, it would happen so fast we will be overwhelmed. Mutated bird-flu pathogens could break out in a Vietnam bird market at 1pm and be in New York London and Saudi by 9pm or faster. Airports are perfect disease carriers and aircraft are perfect incubators. You could paralyse all the major cities in a day from one international airport, just as happened in Twelve Monkeys. By the time one cold sweat breaks out in Cricklewood, there are ten thousand dead in Hanoi. Think I am exaggerating?
Last summer I went for a walk with one man and his dogs in woods quite near the M25. A quiet place, lush green filled with happy people walking and playing. This man was in charge of disaster planning at the NHS. When everything goes down, his job is to bring it back. It’s a billion pound operation. He told me that where we were walking was Emergency Burial Ground 4. ‘We can get 48,000 people buried here in the first month, possibly more. We estimate that perhaps 750,000 will die, a million a week will be infected over two/three months and we couldn’t cope with more than 60,000 deaths on our present planning. The computer model breaks down after a week. Good minds have been at work on this for three years and the system just can’t predict if people will go to work or if electricity will stay on (even if they confine the workers to the powerstations which they will.) They can’t even guarantee there will be a working anti-viral as the ones they have in place such as Tamiflu and others are not designed to beat HN51, merely suppress it and it will take six months to develop one assuming people work full time and don’t fret about their families outside the labs. They can’t even decide who will get the anti-virals first, the cops who will keep the riots in check or the Army who will be drafted in to bury us.

Clearly I had a real choice. Rewrite ‘28 Weeks Later’ or think a little harder about it. But when I walked away from that wood, I knew what I had to do. Not, as you might think, despair.

I am assuming that if the pandemic comes, we shall not stop it, we might slow it down but it might mutate. I decided that I‘d set the story in my favourite city Vancouver, a city that takes public health quite seriously and I wasn’t going to write about heroes. I was thinking about what I would do and run away came to mind. But guess what, they have planned for that. There would be guys with guns waiting for just that situation.

Places that don’t have the virus will severely unkeen to have anyone coming near them. It’s possible that either 2 percent of the world’s population could die if it mirrors the last pandemic. That’s a lot of people, 120 million or more perhaps worse case scenario?

The real trouble with researching such a thing as a plague or pandemic is when do you stop. You could go on for years there’s so much documented about the previous pandemic and about other plagues. Did I go too early – perhaps, but when is enough research. Every month we hear of a new vaccine that will definitely take care of the upcoming problem. You could get dispirited. But how many times have we read that cure for cancer of the common cold is just around the corner? Which corner, not my corner.

I developed some key characters who could represent all of us. A young girl, Fen, whose family flee to a tiny gulf island to wait it out, but as often happens in families, slowly disintegrate under the pressure of boredom and survival conditions. A cab driver whose best friend is a Russian virologist who works part time as a cabbie himself and who thinks he has a cure, but no one but our cabbie and some crack whores will risk taking it. A futurologist from Toronto who can see exactly what is coming and chooses to fly to Vancouver to find the one girl he wants to spend his last days with. His plan is to rent a yacht and cruise the islands until it is over. Two decide to stay and battle it out in the city because they think they won’t catch it, three who run away. Which would be the best choice? What will you choose? Stay or go? Go where?
How welcoming will the islanders be to any newcomers faced with a lethal virus. How many will die trying to get out of an infected city? Who will bury the dead? What the hell happens to the economy in the face of a virus? Or banks and mortgages? What do you do when the ATM doesn’t spew out cash anymore? Which by the by is one of the first things that will happen. That’s research, not even speculation. There are scenarios for every alternative. Last summer I met a banker in Vancouver who was leading a team whose job it was to look for investments that would survive a pandemic. It wasn’t looking good. I noted that he’d already bought himself an island and some guns. He had room for ten and six months supply of anti-virals stashed there.

Researching the future is fraught with multiple scenarios, but don’t be scared. Follow the logic. People still need to eat, still fall in love, still hate one another, still steal or murder, whatever the circumstances. They want to survive. Life doesn’t stop, it merely alters and every circumstance has already happened, you just have to find it. One such pandemic is recorded by Thucydides 431BC. He talked of violent hot headaches, eyes swelling, throats and tongues on fire, bloody spit and a powerful stink of the breath and so many dying they couldn’t find anyone to bury the dead and the mayhem and crazy behaviour that accompanied would be very familiar to any speculative writer today. That’s research. That’s HN51 and it’s coming to Mall near you.

My answer is this. Enjoy the research, the reading, explore as much as you can, make sure some of your characters know some of it but like Guilgud in the movie SHINE, now you know how to play it, forget the notes, play it like you own it, like you mean it. It is so easy to get sidetracked with yet another fact or even a character that suddenly blossoms and become dominant. Remember what your story is and undercut their power, the other characters, your characters will thank you for it. Remember what it was that attracted you to the idea in the first place. Put a note up on the wall by your desk. ‘It’s the story dummy.’ Good characters make a great story, great research makes a thesis.
Your potential readers will appreciate your control and hell, you might even have something left over for the sequel!
Of course when men die, others have opportunities:

An extract from Another Place to Die:
Deka thought he saw movement in Carrall street. Hastings was just one block away with the bums and addicts and he was thinking that he was going to get hit on for something, when he simultaneously remembered that the bums had been the first to go and now Hastings was free of human traffic of any kind. He saw movement again and quickened his pace, something was there and he could hear a weird kind of rumbling and high pitched screaming. It was disturbing and he looked ahead to the rather forlorn Chinese stores abandoned ahead. He turned as the sound turned into a rush and his flesh crawled.
Rats, thousands of rats were literally flowing out of a building and heading screaming and angry towards him! For a moment his heart seemed to stop, his legs froze in place and he could barely take it in. More and more rats were pouring into the street and the noise was scary, uncanny, freaky, like the wind.
He turned and began to run, frantic to find some refuge. Some rats ahead of the pack leapt onto his legs and he had to tear them off, trying not to break his momentum. He realised all too quickly that he was going to be their next meal.
Behind him a sea of rats sensed a feast and their squeals were all the more intense, panicked, hungry, savage – determined.
Deka jumped through a shattered glass store window and ran to the back looking for the stairs; the rats closing in behind, easily scaling the broken glass behind him. He found the stairs and even though he sensed his heart would burst, he rushed up them, crashed through the door and slammed it behind him. He moved to the window and looked out down into the street. Rats flowed like lava along what was now East Pender, diving in and out of the shops, scavenging whatever they could. The noise was too weird and eerie and he knew it would enter his dreams. There seemed to be no end to them. How on earth had they gotten so bad, so many?
© Sam North July 2007 All rights reserved - No reproduction without permission
All titles can be ordered on-line:

ANOTHER PLACE TO DIE by Sam North
Lulu Press – ISBN:1-84753-899-1
$18 Retail – Published January 2007

The Next Great Flu Pandemic is coming. No one can stop it.
Everything your Government said would protect you is a lie.
'In 1919 a worldwide flu pandemic killed 50 million people. The next pandemic could wipe out as many as 500 million – the bad news, it might already be here'.
Read ‘Another Place to Die’ before the next round of winter ‘flu.
It might just save your life.

'Beautiful, plausible, and sickeningly addictive, Another Place to Die will terrify you, thrill you, and make you petrified of anyone who comes near you with so much as a sniffle'. Roxy Williams - Amazon.co.uk

'A powerful portrayal of an underestimated threat'. Ian Middleton

Available from Amazon.com and direct from the publisher Lulu Press
And Waterstones in the UK

Buy direct from Lulu.com or from these good on-line retailers
Amazon UK
Amazon USA
Barnes and Noble USA

Diamonds –The Rush of '72
by Sam North
ISBN: 1-4116-10881 ~ 289 pages $19.95

The amazing true story of the Great Diamond Rush of 1872
Review of DIAMONDS