A Writer's Tale

I decided that he would write” the book in Tucson, Arizona in 1908. His language would have to be that of a boy who’d spent his first 15 years in London and most of his next 20 years in America’s old west. So he might talk like a cross between Huck Finn and Sherlock Holmes.

So that’s the language I created for him.

In preparation, I reread several books by authors such as Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Ian Fleming taking notes along the way. I also listened with special interest whenever I talked to Bob Tanner or Mike Bailey. I made lists, jotting down all sorts of words and phrases that seemed colorful. And I later used a great many of them while writing on Trevor’s behalf.

The trick was to blend everything together so that Trevor’s language would add to the experience of the book, not get in the way. So I kept things fairly simple. The entire novel has the flavor of Trevor’s voice his way of looking at things but I used such expressions as “fantods, “chums,” “dicey” and “I reckon” sparingly.

The language probably does get in the way for some people. Those who aren’t very good readers might need to struggle a little more than usual to figure out what’s actually being said.

But I think that Trevor’s voice adds such richness to the book that I can’t imagine Savage being written any other way.

This is the only book, so far, for which I’ve done vast amounts of research. Not only did I pick through half a dozen books to find colorful words and phrases, but I needed to find out what London was like in 1888. I needed to learn about sailing across the Atlantic ocean in winter. What was Coney Island like during that period: What about railroad routes across America? What did people eat or the plains? How much did a horse cost?

I read books about gunslingers, lawmen, and the Indian wars.

And a lot about Jack the Ripper.

While I wanted all the novel’s background information to be accurate, I was especially interested in getting my Ripper information correct. In particular, I wanted everything about the Mary Kelly murder to be as detailed and accurate as possible.

With the exception of a kid under her bed.

I read and studied plenty of books.

But my research for Savage included a lot more than book-learning. I had been to England, briefly, and paid a visit to the Whitechapel area. I’d been to Coney Island. When I was a kid, my parents had taken my brother and I on train ride from Chicago to Yellowstone Park. I have some vivid memories of that trip, and made use of them when Trevor embarked on his railroad journey to the west. While writing the book, I took a break and we made a research trip to the Law’s Railroad Museum in Bishop, California.

Savage contains a fair amount of gunplay. And I’ve been playing with guns since I was a kid at Boy Scout camp shooting .22 rifles to earn NRA patches and medals. So the firearms scenes didn’t require much new research.

Neither did descriptions of the old west, where I’ve done a lot of traveling over the years.

To top everything off, however, we spent a week at a Wyoming “dude ranch” before I finished writing Savage. There, we rode horses over rough mountain trails. I got the treat of watching some real cowboys in action, and met some real rattlesnakes. While most of Savage had been written before our adventures in Wyoming, my experiences during the trip had a major influence on the final hundred pages.

In a sense, I started writing Savage the moment the notion struck me on June 17, 1990.

After thinking about things for a while, I sat down and wrote the book’s prologue. It starts, “London’s East End was a rather dicey place, but that’s where I found myself, a fifteen-year-old youngster with more sand than sense, on the night of 8 November, 1888.”

It goes on for just a couple of pages. After writing those pages, however, I knew I could write the book and that it had the potential to be the best thing I’d ever written.

Over the next six months, I continued my work on Daring Young Maids/ Blood Games.

During that period, I made extensive notes about the plot and characters of my Ripper book. Bob Tanner found me some information about the Thames River. I also read book after book to get myself ready for the task of actually writing my novel.

After finally getting finished with Daring Young Maids, I sat down to write Savage on November 18, 1990. I finished writing it on September 6, 1991. My working title had been Ripper. But I chose to call my book, Narrow Calls which comes from the prologue: “Had some narrow calls. Run-ins with all manner of ruffians, with mobs and posses after my hide, with Jack the Ripper himself. But I’m still here to tell the tale. Which is what I aim to do right now.”