Thanks to Sarah for allowing me to tag along on her getaway to the desert isles! Our setting is quite fortunate, seeing my latest book is set on the largest desert island of all – Tasmania.
Everybody loves an adventure. There is something about the thought of leaving the ordinary world behind and being thrown into some madcap fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants thriller where anything that can happen will. It’s the stuff dreams are made of.
My love of adventure probably can be blamed on Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series. I wanted to be able to jump on my bicycle and do tours on the hols, evading smuggler gypsies and exploring haunted train tunnels and local castles. Unfortunately, that
was a bit hard to do growing up in Western Australia where the biggest adventure you could have was sneaking through the hole in the fence at the local council dam and collect yabbies. And there were no farmers’ wives from whom we could buy fresh
eggs, ginger beer and tomatoes with twists of salt collected in wax paper.
But the best thing about adventures is the hero. And none comes bigger than Indiana Jones. Handsome, swarthy, witty, and unable to show fear in the face of danger, everybody either wants Dr Jones, or wants to be him. Possibly both if you’re an extreme narcissist. The Indiana Jones movies are hom
ages to the adventure serials pumped out by the major movie studios during the golden age of film. The precursor to soaps, stories such as Flash Gordon, The Perils of Pauline and Dick Tracy kept people returning to the cinema week after week just to see how their heroes got out of their latest impossible fix.
Of course, the era always adds to the story. There is a certain mystique to setting stories in the past, precisely because we romanticise the past. We always think of it as an easier or more innocent time. Plus, it was a time when there was still so much to be discovered. It was the cusp of a time where the world was still opening up to us, but with hindsight we realise that it was also the end of an era. World War II was just around the corner, and with it the world would change all over again.
When Catt Ford and I decided to pen an adventure series, we really wanted it to be an homage to those adventure stories we loved, but we also wanted it to have a bit of a post-modern bent, where mistakes humans made with their world would be realised or foreshadowed, whether it had to do with the treatment of our indigenous people or the way we destroyed land and animals in the name of colonisation. Plus, with hot, gay, lovable men. The result was Dash and Dingo: In Search of the Tasmanian Tiger. The thirties were the ideal time for the setting, and it happened to coincide with a story that I always wanted to tackle – that of the Australian Thylacine, an animal now thought to be extinct, with the last known tiger dying in an Australian zoo in 1936. What better basis for an adventure, in which two heroes battle the Australian ‘jungle’ in search of an elusive creature on the edge of extinction?
The pulp fiction genre is ripe for just cutting loose and having fun with its tropes. We could incorporate action scenes, battles with ‘monsters’, passion, thrills, sex and over-the-top villains. There could be a mixture of locations, our story starts in the repressed
halls of a gloomy British academic institution, and vacations in exotic Siam before coming to the ultimate destination of the far-flung ‘colony’ of Australia.
But the best thing about writing the first in this series of action adventure novels was that I could become that kid again, who adventured around the suburbs on his bicycle, making up impossible and far-fetched stories in my head. But now I can share them.
Dash and Dingo: In Search of the Tasmanian Tiger is now available from Dreamspinner Press.
