Home > Ocean Prey (Lucas Davenport #31)(95)

Ocean Prey (Lucas Davenport #31)(95)
Author: John Sandford


   My brother-in-law Dan called me up and told me that in Golden Prey, I’d referred to a 40mm pistol. Should have been .40 caliber. Calibers are hundredths of an inch, millimeters are . . . millimeters. A 40mm pistol would shoot a bullet about an inch and a half across. There is a 40mm round—it’s fired from a grenade launcher, not the kind of weapon that Lucas Davenport would have tucked under his sport coat.

   How do these mistakes happen? It’s not usually ignorance. They arise out of all kinds of things . . . haste, changes in story, weariness, boredom, juggling too many nouns at once. In another Prey novel, I had a man click off the safety on his Glock 9mm pistol, stolen from a Minneapolis detective, before he entered a house. The 9mm was fine, except Glocks don’t have safeties.

   I’d originally written that the man had been carrying a Beretta, which do have safeties. Then, I made the mistake of talking to a Minneapolis detective who told me there’d been a change of policy, and they were no longer allowed to have personal carry pistols. They were required to use issue pistols, which were all Glocks. So, trying to be accurate, I changed “Beretta” to “Glock”—this was after the novel was essentially finished—and forgot that several lines above that, he’d clicked off the safety . . .

   In Winter Prey, on the first page, I have a snowmobiling villain following a compass course of 375 degrees through a blizzard. That’s tough, since compasses only have 360 degrees. It was supposed to be 275 degrees, or west, but instead, he’s going northeast. I don’t know how that mistake occurred, but it should have been caught by somebody, at some point. I suspect it was a pure typo.

   The thing is, I know about guns and have been shooting since I was in elementary school. I know the difference between millimeters and calibers, I know Glocks don’t have safeties, I know how many degrees there are on a compass.

   Holding a hundred thousand words in your head, through numerous edits and rewrites, is a complicated business, and by the time you get to the end, you can barely stand to read through them again. When you’re dealing with numbers, especially, they can jump up and bite you in the ass.

   Now, to Ocean Prey. I’m a recreational diver, but the diving portrayed in this book isn’t recreational, it’s technical. Scuba diving is overrun with numbers, and necessarily so. It starts right with the capacity (maybe a hundred cubic feet of air) and pressures (maybe 3,000 pounds per square inch) of your scuba tanks. When you’re diving, you have to know how much air you have left (numbers) and how long you’ve been down (numbers) and how deep you went (numbers) and how soon you can dive a second time (numbers). It’s good to know at what depth you start to suffer from nitrogen narcosis (numbers) and how much weight you need to be neutrally buoyant (numbers) and how fast you can surface after you’ve spent time down deep, to avoid decompression sickness (numbers).

   Errors often creep in with this kind of technical matter. Although I dive, I’m not really at ease with technical diving, so I searched high and low for good advice, and wound up consulting my next-door neighbor, Marcus Randolph, who is certified to do almost everything in scuba, and who has dived around much of the world. His comments caused an extensive revision of this book at literally the last moment (a Sunday, I remember it well; the manuscript was due in New York on Monday). I think we got it right; if any mistakes have crept in, they are down to me, and my efforts to simplify a highly technical and numbers-heavy subject matter. I greatly appreciate Marcus’s help with the book.

   However, if you are a diver, and you do find a serious error, I would ask that you write it down on a piece of scrap paper, then wad the paper up, put it in your mouth, and chew thoroughly before you swallow.

   I don’t want to hear about it.

   I’m asking nice—don’t make me come over there.

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp. He is the author of twenty-nine Prey novels; four Kidd novels; twelve Virgil Flowers novels; three YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook; and three other books.

 

 

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