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Stephen Laws

I've said many times over the years, that if a writer wants a supernatural thriller or horror tale to succeed, then the reader has to be able to believe in the characters and their situation. The key to making the unbelievable believable lies right there—and creating real people in a real situation is the bedrock that's required before the unreal or the supernatural begins to intrude on their lives. So, with a commitment to getting the reality right, I've always been committed to thorough research before I write my novels.

For Ghost Train, that meant getting to understand the mechanics of a locomotive, how it operates, how it's powered, how the hooking mechanisms to carriages work, how you drive it. I spent a lot of time with British Rail crew—actually got to sit in the driver's seat in the cab on the King's Cross mainline. Since the locomotive in my novel was going to supernaturally mutate from a machine to a living organism, I had to know the locomotive inside-out.

For Somewhere South of Midnight, I spent time with ambulance personnel and fire crew in preparation for the opening scene of the novel—a multiple vehicle collision on a motorway. Only then could I bring a sense of reality to the emergency services' response. Things I learned from that experience—things I hadn't taken into account—subsequently informed the narrative and made for plot twists that I hadn't originally conceived. That's one of the joys of research.

In the climax of my novel Daemonic, the mortally wounded driver of a bulldozer causes mayhem. At the bottom of my garden at that time, a housing development was underway—so when a bulldozer lurched past, it was only a short walk from my desk to the fence and a chat with the foreman. Minutes later, I was roaring up and down, getting the hang of the gear-shifts. Much to the consternation of my then neighbours. It all went into the book.

Since Chasm was about a supernatural earthquake, involving a great deal of collapsing buildings and rubble—and there was a shopping center in the vicinity due for demolition at the time I was preparing the outline—a little bit of fancy footwork got me involved with the demolition company, and all the research information I needed.

Occasionally, research can be a little dangerous. When I wanted to investigate how police divers went about searching for bodies presumed drowned, it led me to a so-called "controlled" dive in one of Stockport's canals, in full scuba gear—an incident that I nearly didn't get out of alive. (I won't go into the full details here, but anyone interested in a full description of the event can check it out on my website www.stephenlaws.com.)

And so to Darkfall.

There's a dedication in the novel, as follows: "I'd like to say a Big Thank-You to George Jackson and his colleagues at Northumbria Police for their invaluable assistance on operational detail and police procedure. The aberrant behaviour of some of the characters in Darkfall and their flouting of police rules and regulations are all inventions of the author and no resemblance to persons living, dead or undead is intended." The inside story? George and I are friends who go back a long way, and at the time of preparing the novel, he was in charge of the administrative arm of Northumbria Police. As I developed my outline, I asked George if he could surreptiously run my developing plot past any police officers in the know on a "What if?" basis.

Darkfall begins with the occupants of an office block suddenly disappearing on Christmas Eve, with a storm descending and all Hell about to erupt. I knew that the police procedure of the investigating squad was going to be vital to the success of the novel. Although I knew where the story was going—I also knew that I had to have a cast-iron police-procedural basis. So, I'd tell George what was happening on a scene-by-scene basis. He'd go away, come back and tell me (without sourcing his contact) what a squad might do in response to what was unfolding. This was really good for me as a writer, since I could test that practical response against the supernatural mayhem that I wanted to develop. Once I'd worked on the scenario to take account of that advice, I'd come back to George with the next plot development and queries—he'd go away, come back in due course with the next police response. And so on—and so on...

With the outline complete, and the novel well underway—George came back to ask why I hadn't asked him for further advice recently. I told him that I'd got everything I needed, thanks a million, and would he like another beer. He grinned, and told me that there would be a lot of disappointed police officers. They'd been using my developing outline as an official intellectual training exercise for the force. So now they really wanted to know what was going to happen next.

Finally, another research story about Darkfall. We've all read novels and stories, or seen movies and TV episodes where the hero or heroine has to climb an elevator shaft. By the time I came to write the novel, I'd lost count of the variations—and I'd wondered for a long time how much of what I'd read or what I'd seen on screen was based on the actuality, or how much was artistic license. Since Darkfall was to be set in an office block at the height of a storm, and the elevator shaft was to have a pivotal place in the plot, and my characters were going to have to spend time in there (notice that I'm trying not to put a spoiler into this article)—I wanted to get the reality right. I decided to go to the experts. I got in touch with an elevator company and told them what I was trying to do.

I ended up in a pub with two engineers who were frustrated at the way that books and movies had depicted elevator shaft sequences. The result? Having told them exactly what I wanted for the novel, they produced plans of a typical shaft, we examined and analysed them in depth—and I got a complete description of how someone could ascend or descend in the circumstances I wanted. It was a great session, and—as usual—I got much, much more than I'd anticipated. But it wasn't quite enough for them.

Which is how I ended up on a maintenance inspection "climb" of an elevator shaft.

So—when it comes to the elevator shaft stuff in Darkfall?

Believe me—it's well researched.

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