By Beau L’Amour
Skyring Water is a Cold War thriller, a hunt for a mysterious and deadly treasure that leads from Spain to Israel, then Venezuela, Argentina, and Chile. Most of the action is set in the year I was born, 1961: the year of Eisenhower’s military-industrial-complex speech and the Bay of Pigs invasion, of Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard going to space, of the Berlin Wall going up and the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba exploding over Novaya Zemlya. It was an era of incredible historical resonance, but it’s the echoes I remember, not the events. I was far too young.
I suspect we are all fascinated by those unknown or long-forgotten times that created us. The first draft of Skyring Water was written by my father, Louis L’Amour, between 1958 and 1960. That early version was less than half the length of the book we recently finished, but it carries the DNA of its age. It set the example for the brawny and unapologetic men – and women – I would need to write, and it telegraphed the style of a time that was confident yet teetering on the edge of extinction.
My father had a time machine. That was how he referred to his library of more than 25,000 books, pamphlets, and maps. Using it to study the locations and era in which the revised story would take place, I picked up the trail of his earlier work. In his copy of Sailing Directions for South America, Volume II, there were paragraphs highlighted in his distinctive red pencil. This was the route our characters would take. Conditions and descriptions of the landscape were noted in Uttermost Part of the Earth, Lucas Bridges’s memoir of growing up in turn-of-the-century Tierra del Fuego. Most interestingly, I discovered a collection of 1958 vintage charts my father had purchased specifically for Skyring Water. I was able to bring them into the new book, and to use some of the erroneous information they contained as part of the plot. They literally became props that exist within the narrative.
A lot of my take on the locations and the characters comes from people I’ve known. Mike Demetre, a close family friend who worked in Air Force intelligence and the State Department, helped me refine my vision of the world in the early 1960s; I was lucky enough to have spent time with him in the West Indies when he was an official with USAID just after the invasion of Grenada. Through my father’s connection to an educational charity, and through my own foray as co-founder of a similar organization, I was able to meet the physicists Murray Gell-Mann and Edward Teller, both of whom tangentially inspired characters in Skyring Water. And a good friend, Bob Condon, a Vietnam-era Navy SEAL attached to a submarine crew, contributed a great deal of the technical detail, along with a sense of the kind of man who takes on those assignments.
A lot of writing is solving the impossible challenges your characters face … solving them with the tools available in the era. With Bob’s help, I had to get a small group of divers into a sealed submarine without flooding it, then bring the boat to the surface with a minimum of equipment. We “dove” the submarine on paper, working out each problem as my heroes encountered them. I was creating a booby-trapped locked-room caper, a hundred feet down, and in ice cold water.
I rewatched the Jacquez Cousteau TV specials and Sea Hunt episodes I had seen as a child. I searched out vintage dive catalogs and the memoirs of salvage divers. I tried to perfect every detail, verify that every line of dialog was appropriate to the period. If I’ve learned anything it was that you have to find a way to get inside your fiction, to believe it yourself, to make your experience writing it both entertaining and convincing. I’m sure I’ve made a few errors along the way, but I owe my father and our readers a debt of accuracy … and that’s what has made Skyring Water such an incredible journey.
