The Golden Keel / The Vivero Letter (62 page)

He went very still, then leaned forward and said gently, ‘Yes, sir; what have you to tell me?’ It was the beginning of
a beautiful friendship. It turned out that there had not been a murder in Totnes within living memory and he would have to look up the details in the books.

In writing this novel I studied the geography of Yucatan, Mayan architecture, deep diving techniques, the Spanish Armada and a few other things. Two years after the book was written I was pleased to see photographs which showed that the archeological techniques I had devised in my own head were in actual use. I was even more pleased the other day when I gave a copy of V
IVERO
to one of the experienced divers from HMS
Inslow
, the naval diving tender, and asked him to point out any flaws in the diving techniques described. He could not find any, so I must have done something right.

Later, R
UNNING
B
LIND
was the first book I researched on the ground and the improvement in authenticity of background was immediately apparent. All subsequent books have been so researched leaving my seat in the library to others. It was my first espionage book and was written just after the death of Ian Fleming whose James Bondery had hitherto made the writing of a serious spy story impossible. Set in Iceland it was my attempt to illustrate the utter absurdity of the international espionage scene and I think that, in part, I succeeded, although it is most difficult to satirize the antics of the CIA—one cannot satirize the already ludicrous. Again I had apparently done something right—the novel was adapted as a three-part serial by the BBC.

While the task of writing novels is as lonely a job as being a lighthouse keeper there are associated compensations, the biggest of which is the opportunity to travel once one is away from the typewriter keyboard. This is a real bonus. When I wrote R
UNNING
B
LIND
I was bitten by the travel bug; I have visited Greenland, crossed the Sahara, been to the South Pole by courtesy of the US State Department and the US Navy, and travelled in every continent except Asia.

In these countries there is the opportunity to find interesting places and to meet interesting people. On a recent visit to North America I did a night patrol in a police car in Pasadena, drifted over Los Angeles at an incredibly low altitude in one of the Sheriff’s helicopters, rode an airboat through the Florida Everglades, went over the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California from which the Voyager/Jupiter and Viking/Mars unmanned space shots are controlled, visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and played with computers in Toronto. It is from these experiences that I weave my tales.

Referring to computers I suppose I must mention my own which has attracted a certain amount of journalistic attention. These days one can hardly pick up a newspaper without finding an article about word processing and text editing controlled by machines using the ubiquitous silicon chip. Some years ago, when I installed my computer, I suppose I was ahead of my time, although not ahead of Len Deighton.

The computer is a data manipulating machine. I can write the first draft of a novel into the computer and then make changes selectively without having to type out the whole thing again. I can alter or switch about words, sentences, paragraphs or whole chapters. I can even change the names of characters if the names I have chosen are unsatisfactory and the machine will run through the whole book and make the alterations automatically. Then, when everything is to my satisfaction, I instruct the computer to print the whole book which it does largely unsupervised.

The computer also looks after the business side of my career, so much so that my publisher now complains that I know more about his business than he does. And on a rainy Saturday afternoon I can play an eighteen hole round of golf on the computer or land a spaceship on Venus.

But when all is said and done the computer remains merely an electronic quill pen, taking the donkey work out
of writing and leaving more time for creativity. It is hard to convince journalists that this is so and that the machine does not actually plot and write my books for me.

I hope you have as much fun reading my books as I had in the writing.

D
ESMOND
B
AGLEY

1979

Desmond Bagley was born in 1923 in Kendal, Westmorland, and brought up in Blackpool. He began his working life, aged 14, in the printing industry and then did a variety of jobs until going into an aircraft factory at the start of the Second World War.

When the war ended, he decided to travel to southern Africa, going overland through Europe and the Sahara. He worked en route, reaching South Africa in 1951.

Bagley became a freelance journalist in Johannesburg and wrote his first published novel,
The Golden Keel
, in 1962. In 1964 he returned to England and lived in Totnes, Devon, for twelve years. He and his wife Joan then moved to Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Here he found the ideal place for combining his writing and his other interests, which included computers, mathematics, military history, and entertaining friends from all over the world.

Desmond Bagley died in April 1983, having become one of the world’s top-selling authors, with his 16 books—two of them published after his death—translated into more than 30 languages.

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‘I’ve read all Bagley’s books and he’s marvellous, the best.’

ALISTAIR MACLEAN

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