You're absolutely correct, Green Frog. Donald Hamilton got his gun stuff right 99% of the time. My Dad introduced me to Matt Helm when I was 12 (about 1967). Matt taught me about .357 and .44 Magnums; that some aluminum framed snubbies held 5 shots, and other brands held 6 (and that they both kicked hard and were extremely loud!); that silencers didn't work on revolvers; that sniper rifles, once they were dialed in, were handled very carefully (including putting desicant packages in the gun case to combat humidity); and that shotguns scared hell out of him.

A wonderful writer and even better storyteller. The two do not always go hand in hand.

Now you have me wondering about the 1%. I have every one of his books, and a few of his articles in gun rags (probably read them all when published), and I don't remember the 1%. Of course, my memory isn't what it used to be when . . . What was I saying?

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Formerly Model520Fan

I recently purchased "the expert's guide to handgun marksmanship" by Casada, from NRA's "special offers" on line deal. It looked good because it contained contributions from Charles Askins Jr., Jeff Cooper, Jullian S. Hatcher, A.L.A. Himmelwright, Jack O'Connor, William Reichenbach, and The U.S. Army Field Mannuals. I'm still looking positively at exploring its contents, but getting past the "introduction" wher the author references the "gunslingers and lawmen on our western frontier of the 1900's", and also listed a "fourth lasting American handgun design is Elmer Keith's and Philip Sharpe's 1934 Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum of Dirty Harry fame." I'm sure there is more, but it was all I could stand at one sitting. I intend to attempt to overlook whatever of the author's input remains, but my initially resonse was very negative because it was set forward as a really great book by NRA. It was $15.00 plus shipping, which was not "book rate" and when I got it, It was a 3/8 " thick little paperback that measured 4X6 inches. The description and the picture on line lead me to expect something very different. I didn't check it out like I usually do because it was NRA-won't do that again! I just hope the rest of the content is taken directly from the original sources. Watch out! Flapjack

That's hitting the nail on the head! I plan on checking out your books as they sound interesting.

Thanks, Andrew. An editor once told me that readers who enjoy a series of mystery/suspense novels are attracted primarily by two main features: the personality of the sleuth character, who should deepen and grow from book to book, and the appeal of the setting (both time and place), which should offer enough familiarity and yet uniqueness to be as diverting as a vacation.

She laid this on me by way of suggesting that my setting, the hilly woodlands and old farms and villages of northeastern Vermont, might not provide a sufficiently entertaining diversion to enough readers. Maybe she's right, I don't know, but readers who know Vermont tell me they like the cultural aspects as much as the rather twisted plots.

Don's Bellevance novels are first rate, and I recommend them highly. The Vermont of which he writes is as much a character in his stories as a locale. I have never lived there, but I felt an immediate kinship with the place when I visited decades ago. If it weren't for the family and friends keeping me in Southern California's Orange County, I would quite possibly relocate to the one in Vermont.

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David Wilson

LOL! Wish I had seen that.

Suzanne Arruda writes quite good novels set in colonial Kenya, about 1920. I'll post her site, so that I don't have to list all the details that you can find there. Her husband Joe does a great job with her site. I enjoyed meeting both at a book signing about two years ago.

But her gun knowledge is limited, and she has been willing to accept some advice from me, and to credit me for it in her last two books. Some additional thoughts have come from other sources. I suggested a Colt New Service in .45 Colt for her heroine's lover, Sam, a WW I ace who turned to adventure in East Africa after the war. Mrs. Arruda decided that this gun would be the M-1917 variant, and that it was Sam's former service revolver, bought after the war.

Other guns in the later books are also pretty plausible. And she now has a copy of Taylor's, African Rifles and Cartridges. I had the impression that she was amazed that there could be so much information on guns! Well, she isn't the only college prof of whom that could be said...

If you think you might like the setting and the adventures, see if your library has the books, or will order them. Your wife may also like them. Indeed, I'm pretty sure that most of her readers are women. But the books have enough of an edge that they aren't just books for gentle ladies.

It is actually quite rare for authors to be able to write good fiction and to know firearms well. I have often wondered why. I think it's because literary people are taught to view guns as items admired only by terrorists and rednecks.

Those who know guns write mainly about them, or about hunting or military subjects. They seldom write fiction.

If I ever finish my first novel, I hope to have the storytelling skills and vocabulary of an author and the gun knowledge that most don't. But one has to be careful to avoid going overboard on tech data that will interest only the gun nut. For instance, don't look for "dash numbers" after I say that a character has a Smith & Wesson Model 66 .357. Barrel lengths, though, are a valid thing to state. An exception might be if a very valuable or historical gun is stolen. Otherwise, I think that excessive firearms knowledge just looks like bragging on one hand, or lack of storytelling ability and lack of wise apprehension about New York editors' gun phobias on the other. If they think a character is too pro-gun, that could easily be the kiss of death for a manuscript!

The late Robert A. Heinlein, a very successful sci-fi writer, fought his battles with NYC editors to get his pro-gun views into print, and he was a lot more famous than most authors. I suspect that the subtle, low key approach may be best. But I'll get away with what I can.

Did any of you ever go to David Lindsey's site and read his sample chapters? How did you like his style? Here he is again, in case you missed my earlier posts. www.davidlindsey.com He seems to be retired now, but that guy could write! And the gunfight scene in his, Spiral is just the most believable that I've seen in fiction!

T-Star

One of my favorite authors is Nevada Barr. She writes about a park service ranger in different parks across the country. What's great about her books is that she actually was a park ranger in all of the parks she's wrote about. That's one of the reasons I like her books and style. She's lived alot of the life she writes about and that adds something to a book you can feel, least I feel it.
Nothing wrong with a well researched book and never having done any of the things written in it. But the author can add the little details that make it totally believable if they've actually been there and done that so to speak. Those are the books I've really come to enjoy.

It was in "Murderer's Row", I think. Helm had just beaten up a female agent (one of his own) on orders, to set her up to be accepted as a turncoat. She died on him. It seemed to him like his own organization was trying to arrest him (or worse). He ended up stabbing another agent (who was trying to kill him), a young'un that was "in love" with the dead female. Helm called for a doctor. The Doc came, but was trying to get Helm to come in. Matt held his snub nosed .38 special, the hammer cocked and held by his thumb, the trigger depressed, pointed at the Doc's gut, and announced the ballistics of the .38 special (there was another agent sneaking up behind him to cold cock him). He had the MV at 1100 or 1200 fps, with a correspondingly large ME (this with a 158 grain bullet). Whew! Damn I'm long winded. Anyway, that's about the only blip I remember. Maybe it's more like 99.9% of the time, huh?

Gunsandguitars,

Thanks! I think it's about time for me to re-read some of those, anyway.

520

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Formerly Model520Fan

Sir,

I tend to take a similar view. Regrettably, most authors who write the kind of fiction where firearms play a significant role tend to be Gun People first, Writers second. Those who write stories in which the gun plays a bit part are (generally) stronger on plot, characterization, and other conventional narrative elements at the cost of technical competence.

The sad result is a three-way market split - you have people who spin a good yarn but know jack about small arms, people who excerpt technical manuals where their characters are supposed to go, and that rarest breed that can straddle the line of strong narrative and a working knowledge of the finer points of light gunnery.

The greatest trick in writing isn't to tell what you know. It's figuring out how much you need to tell of what you know.

Vince Flynn, author of the excellent Mitch Rapp series, almost always gets the guns right. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are also pretty good; their main character, Pendergast, carries a Les Baer .45.
On the other hand are the writers such as the one who said a 20-gauge shotgun would "knock a charging bear backward."
Lots of times these things DO depend on the knowledge of a copy editor. I made my living as one for 33 years and, if a particular subject was not my area of expertise, I made darn sure I didn't change anything without thorough research.

I'll try to find that one again. I guess that he had in mind a "dead man's switch" in that if the other guy shot him, Helm's hammer would fall. Might or might not work in real life.

Helm didn't ever state a model number of his .38 snubs, but the descriptions made it clear that he sometimes had a Bodyguard or a Model 60. In the first book, Death of a Citizen, he was using his old wartime Colt Woodsman .22.
In another, he had a snub Python that had belonged to the dead man whom he was impersonating.

It's getting hard to find the Helm books or the original James Bond ones at used book dealers. I realized with a shock that these familiar books are now over 40 years old!

Oh: Search for Modesty Blaise, read about her, and try (really hard!) to find one of the novels. They were very correct in their gun data, although I think that Modesty was wise to switch from her original Colt .32 (model not stated) to a Star PD .45. She favored the S&W M-57 .41 Magnum for longer range work, when concealment wasn't a factor. I'm pretty sure that the author never fired one, or Modesty might have had a .357 instead. Few girls can handle a .41 or .44 Magnum.

Texas Star writes: "It is actually quite rare for authors to be able to write good fiction and to know firearms well. I have often wondered why. I think it's because literary people are taught to view guns as items admired only by terrorists and rednecks."

T-star, take it from a longstanding freelance writer who has known a lot of "literary people" both in publishing and in academia down through the decades, really, they are not "taught to to view guns as items admired only by terrorists and rednecks." Believe me, the great majority of literary people are plenty worldly and smart enough to recognize that many astute, accomplished, law-abiding people in many cultures all over the world have a high regard for firearms and for shooting sports as well as for firearms collecting.

As I mentioned earlier in this discussion, the problem (when there is a problem) lies in the fact that literary people often live in or near the big cites, where their personal experience with firearms is usually negligible. When they make a mistake, it may often be the kind of mistake that editors don't catch (as they would probably catch mistakes in other areas), because the editors don't know much about guns either, and they trust that the writer has gotten it right. And usually he has gotten it right. That is, most writers get it right most of the time, thanks to the care they invest in research and to the extraordinary professional scrutiny of copy editors. Still, from time to time, fiction writers make small mistakes that get past everybody--not just mistakes concerning guns, but also mistakes concerning horticulture, medicine, meteorology, food science, medieval history, and on and on. The mistakes are usually the result of simple carelessness or of the writer's unfortunate trust in his own faulty conviction.

For members of this forum who like to read fiction, mistakes concerning guns are not just disappointing, they are irritating, because they can feel almost like an insult to the area of expertise we are so respectful and enamored of. Members of this forum, however, may overlook (or not even notice) the misnaming of an orchid or the misplacement in time of the start of the Boxer Rebellion.

Fiction writers really do want to get everything right, because they know that the crucial element of verisimilitude is riding on each detail. It's a shame when they blow it, and they are duly shamed when that happens, believe me.

Fiction writers often have (or have had) rich lives in other fields, like Michael Crichton in medicine, or John Grisham in law. But they don't know a lot about everything they may have occasion to write about. For that reason, they do research--and when they are writing about something abstruse, they will run the relevant passages by an expert in the field. This practice is quite common--and also quite effective. All successful fiction writers are necessarily adept at the craft--at plotting and character and narrative development--but those skills do not come "at the cost of technical competence." Obviously, they can't know everything--and yet often a story may lead a writer into special areas, say into numismatics or into ornithology, with which he is unfamiliar. When that happens, as so many fine writers have done for decades and decades, he consults somebody who knows coin collecting or avian behavior. He wants to get it right.

The trick in writing really isn't "how much to tell of what you know"; rather, where necessary, it's in how to find out enough about what you want to tell. Good writers have excellent instincts that guard against over-writing. Trimming the excess is a key skill--and when they're lax, usually a good editor will do the trimming for them.

Poorly worded on my part. Probably should have pointed out that I refer to the stuff that gets posted on gun boards as opposed to works that have been formally published (not that the phenomenon is unique to shooters - by any stretch).

With that last bit, my clumsy point was that 100% of your research probably shouldn't wind up the story; i.e., if you read a thousand-page book on relevant subject matter you need to find the relevant points and use those. I used to be bad about trying to cram too much of my newfound knowledge into a story where it didn't fit.

I'm somewhat more willing to forgive an author if their character is a non-shooter (doctor, scientist, what have you) that slips up on their firearms knowledge than, say, an old western gunfighter with a swing-out single action Colt or a Navy SEAL carrying a .357 mag with a safety catch.

Elsewise...points well taken.

Absolutely, John--and you're right about the temptation on a writer's part to squeeze in more of what he has gathered in researching a key subject than actually deserves a place in the story. Usually, if he's judicious and ruthless enough in revision, he'll have enough distance by then to trim out the superfluous material. And whatever else he may be overly attached to a good editor will flag for him later.

I realize the conversation has moved past this, but... Unless you were more specific somewhere about model, you really don't have anything to feel bad about. If your book was relatively recent, SIG Sauer has released a couple of 9mm SA only models capable of being carried cocked and locked. If the setting was further in the past, the SIG P210 is a 9mm SA capable of cocked and locked that has been around since 1949 and used by military, police and civilians. It’s not one you will see in every gun shop you walk in to, but not exactly rare either, especially outside the US.

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BT
EGO VOLUNTAS HAUD OBEDIO

Stephen Hunter wrote 'Point Of Impact' & some other great books but had Navajo Indians living in Ajo on the Papago Reservation... oops off by a couple hundred miles! Aparently he didn't bother to look @ a map.

Thanks for taking the trouble to mention this, BT. Really, this clarification makes me feel a whole lot better about what has been a rueful irritation for me for years.

Hillerman's books are popular primarily because of his attempts to use Navajo, Zuni and Hopi culture and locations as key plot elements.

Early on he got quite a bit of criticism from people of those cultures, because he made a number of mistakes about them. What he got into print was "close enough" for us white folks, but not for native people. Based on constructive criticism his work has improved. Basically, native Americans liked the fact that Hillerman wrote from a positive and sensitive perspective about the traditions and history of the people of the Southwest, so his errors were overlooked for the most part.

I guess my point is that if a writer makes an error about a gun, it is reasonable to consider his other facts as possibly in error as well. Hopefully to errors will be small enough that the spell isn't broken.

One writer I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is Bernard Cornwell, author of the Sharpe's Rifles series. My sense is that he really does his homework, particularly on blackpowder arms and edged weapons.

"I guess my point is that if a writer makes an error about a gun, it is reasonable to consider his other facts as possibly in error as well."



That was the point to this thread. Thanks for everyone jumping in, especially the authors, copy editors and others in the industry. Gives us an insight to how the industry works.

Interesting old thread.

Today I was reading Ratlines by Stuart Neville (2013). Set in 1963 in Ireland. On page 280 a character uses a Glock. Glock 17 didn't go into service until 1982 IIRC. No time machine in the plot.

My brother , a non-gunny, got me started on a bunch of the Lee Childs series of books where the good guy is jack Reacher.
I was quite disappointed in how poorly the author dealt with gun details.
One of the stories has Reacher blasting a bad guy with a shotgun loaded with 00 Buck, and it is explained that the pellets are over a dozen steel ball bearings.
Pretty lame.

Another writer of some note living here in my home state of NC is Nicholas Sparks. His genre is mostly aimed at female readers, but he has attempted to expand his readership to males also.
One of his books that I read was set in Craven Co., NC, near the coast and the main character was a Sheriff's Deputy.
Wow - you could tell Mr. Sparks had NEVER had any experience with the LE life. The character had no real work schedule, switched between being a Patrol Deputy to an Investigator and back all within days. Went to the range whenever he wanted, routinely violated rights of people he was seeking in the story, and the list goes on.

I emailed Sparks through his publisher offering assistance should he need any help on firearms or LE-related information. No reply.

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Ret'd LEO
SWCA #2275