Because I envisioned the man who hired him as a pukka sahib type, the thought came to me of making the elusive volume one of Rudyard Kipling’s. I accordingly availed myself of an armload of rare book catalogues to find out where Kipling stood in the antiquarian book market. I also got hold of a biography of the author and read it.
My research and my vaunted writer’s imagination worked hand in hand. I figured out that the particular book in question would be the sole surviving copy of a privately printed edition which Kipling saw fit to destroy; my copy would be one he’d already presented to his great good friend, writer H. Rider Haggard. I plotted the book accordingly, then went back to the research desk to learn more about Kipling now that I knew what I was looking for. I read a collection of his poems. I sifted some anecdotal material.
Then I started writing the book. And, intermittently, I stopped for some specific spot-research when points came up during the writing that required it.
I could have done more research. I could have read everything Rudyard Kipling wrote instead of limiting myself to the poetry collection and the Just So Stories. I can’t see that it would have hurt the book had I known more, because there’s always the possibility I would have stumbled on something that would have enriched my novel.
By the same token, I could have managed to write this book with considerably less research than I did. I could have invented an item of rare Kiplingana without taking pains to root it in the facts of his life. It would have been good enough with less research, I suspect, but it would not have been as good a book as it is now (whatever its overall merits may be).
How much or how little research any area demands is very definitely a subjective judgment. If the Kipling book played a less central role in the mystery, I’d have been wasting time to delve into the subject so deeply. If it played a greater role — if, say, the whole puzzle hinged on various events in the great man’s life — then more extensive research might well have been indicated.
If you substitute antique furniture for Rudyard Kipling in what I’ve just recounted, you’ll see how the same principles would apply in our gothic novel. And if you’ll substitute whatever unfamiliar subject matter plays a role in your own novel, you’ll be able to see to what extent research is required.
What about geographical research? How much do you have to know about a place in order to set a novel there?
Once again, the amount of research advisable is both subjective and relative. Feasibility is a consideration here. I spent an afternoon in Forest Hills Gardens walking around the neighborhood where Bernie was to steal The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow, but Forest Hills Gardens is only a fifty-cent subway ride from my door. If I were writing that gothic novel we’ve been talking about — and I’m beginning to feel as though I am — I could hardly afford to go winging off to Devon for the sake of local color.
On the other hand, if I felt this gothic had enough going for it so that it might transcend its genre and be a candidate for “bestsellerdom,” then it might indeed be worth a trip to Devon to give it that added dimension. But if my plot’s nothing more than a good honest sow’s ear, in no way transmutable into silk-purse status, I don’t want to spend as much on research as I can legitimately expect to earn on the finished book.
When I wrote the Tanner books, my hero commonly visited eight or ten countries in a single novel, zipping sleeplessly if not tirelessly all over the globe. Equipped with a decent atlas and a library of travel guides, it’s not all that difficult to do an acceptable job of faking a location. A few details and deft touches in the right places can do more to make your book appear authentic then you might manage via months of expensive and painstaking on-the-spot research.
I don’t want to suggest that such research would be detrimental to a book, just that it’s often too costly in time and money to be undertaken. It’s worth noting, too, that in certain instances a smattering of ignorance can be useful. In the Tanner books, I’m quite sure my Balkan settings bore little relationship to reality. Then again, I’m equally certain the overwhelming majority of my readers weren’t aware of the discrepancy between my version of Yugoslavia and the real one. I was free to make Yugoslavia as I wished it to be for the purpose of the story I wanted to tell, as if I were a science-fiction writer shaping an uncharted planet to my fictive purpose.
I don’t know how comfortable I’d be working this way now; I’ve become a more meticulous writer, sacrificing brash self-confidence in the process. I know, too, that the cavalier attitude I showed would have been a mistake if I had been writing for a market composed of readers who knew Yugoslavia firsthand. One thing a reader will not abide is glaring evidence that the writer doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The work of James Hadley Chase is a good example of this. Chase writes hard-boiled suspense novels set in the United States, and while he may have visited here briefly he certainly never spent substantial time on these shores. His American locations never ring true and his American slang is wildly off the mark, the American equivalent of having a dutchess drop her “aitches” like a Cockney costermonger. Because of this, his novels have never sold terribly well in the U.S. and most of them are not published over here.
But this doesn’t hurt him in England. Some of his readers may realize that the United States of James Hadley Chase bears about as much resemblance to reality as the Africa of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but the false notes don’t constantly hit them between the eyes — and they’re reading the books for action and suspense, not for their travelogue value. So Chase continues to sell very well over there, year in and year out.
Is Chase a poorer writer because the United States of his fiction differs so greatly from the real United States? I don’t think so. It’s worth remembering, I think, that fakery is the very heart and soul of fiction. Unless your writing is pure autobiography in the guise of a novel, you will continually find yourself practicing the dark arts of the illusionist and the trade of the counterfeiter. All our stories are nothing but a pack of lies. Research is one of the tools we use to veil this deception from our readers, but this is not to say that the purpose of research is to make our stories real. It’s to make them look real, and there’s a big difference.
Sometimes a few little details will turn the trick, doing far more to provide the illusion of reality than a mind-numbing assortment of empty facts and figures. Sometimes a phony detail works as well as a real one. Bernie Rhodenbarr talks admiringly of the Rabson lock, making me sound quite the expert; there is no Rabson lock — I borrowed the name from Rex Stout’s novels. Archie Goodwin always has things to say about the Rabson lock.
Sometimes these little “authentic touches” can happen quite by accident. When I read galleys of Two For Tanner, I was startled when a CIA agent in Bangkok pointed out “drops and meeting places and fronts — a travel agency, a tobbo shop, a cocktail lounge, a restaurant....”
A tobbo shop?
What on earth was a tobbo shop?
I checked my manuscript. I’d written “a tobacco shop” and a creative linotypist had vastly improved on it. I decided a tobbo shop would be the perfect CIA front, adding a cracker-jack bit of local color.
So I left it like that.
And now I look forward to the day when I spot in someone else’s fiction a reference to the notorious tobbo shops of Thailand. And who’s to say that the day will never come when some enterprising Thai opens a tobbo shop of his own? Stranger things have happened.