The Importance of Research

When I wrote “Run!” I literally had no idea what the urban landscape in Johannesburg was like. I kept it kind of generic, but generic doesn’t give you verisimilitude. And sometimes it can come out extremely wrong.

That was a pretty long time ago (unfortunately). More recently, when I wrote “Dr. Mauser and the Guns of St. Mary’s”, which is set on the central, smallest island in Malta, Comino, I took advantage of resources authors in a previous age couldn’t have dreamed of. Let alone the satellite imagery from Google Maps, there’s also the Street View function. And even though there are virtually no roads on Comino, so no Google camera cars driving around, there was a wealth of 360°geolocated tourist photos from all over the island. There was far more detail available than I could even use just to set my characters in place authentically.

It also caused a number of changes to the plot. Like discovering that the passenger ferry that arrives at Blue Lagoon is exactly that, a passenger only ferry. I learned about the history of the cannons nearly being stolen and the effort to restore them to their original placement. I spotted the trails they used in the aerial photos, and the undercuts in the limestone and the sea caves in the coastline. I even picked out the hangar used from the layout of the airport.

I also hit Wikipedia, which, while not a reliable source for recent history or anything political, is a very thorough resource for things like vehicle specs. I chose the particular model Gulfstream jet based on it having the range to make the trip (as determined by getting a great circle distance from Google Earth), and even slipped in the Sicily reference because the path would cross it.

It was a lot of research for such a simple and short story. And it was even frustrating in the way it kept causing me to change parts of the plot, but it was worth it just for the sense of being there.

Of course, since nobody reading this has actually seen the story, I’ll be posing it here shortly. While it fits in the continuity, it’s written to be stand alone and has a lot of introductory material that would have to go if I folded it in.

(Image credit: Sam and Max, Freelance Police, by Steve Purcell.)