Writing novels can be rather similar. It’s a journey that can start out confidently, then lose visibility, diverge hopelessly from reality, and end in a catastrophic smash. If Glory Boys has managed to avoid this outcome – and a good landing is any one that the pilot, or writer, can walk away from – then I owe a lot to my in-flight instruments. Most important among these are the friends and colleagues who support my writing in a thousand and one essential ways – and most important of all is my wife, Nuala, who is compass and turn indicator par excellence. It if weren’t for her unerring eye for false positioning, this entire business of writing novels would have crashed and burned a long time back. I also owe a major debt of gratitude to Mark Buckland, who was extraordinarily generous with his help on the technical flying aspects of the manuscript.
But I’ve also been helped by one other thing: namely, keeping a close eye on historical truth. As far as possible, Glory Boys is faithful to the aviation achievements of the day, and to what is and isn’t possible in the air. Of all the reference books which have helped me construct this narrative, the one that has most often been close to me is the Aircraft Handbook by Colvin and Colvin, the 1921 edition. The book instructs the reader in everything from how to assemble a plane (yes, really) to the ins and outs of aerial navigation. Inscribed inside the front cover, in March 1924, by a lieutenant belonging to the First Observation Squadron of the US Air Service, Mitchell Field, New York, the book has a period flavour like nothing else.
As for the stunts, I’ve sought to make these extreme, but possible. Movie pilots certainly did drop off towers, much as Willard did for Heaven’s Beloved. Willard’s bob and dive over the pine trees in Ruxion was adapted from a true life account of a similar incident, where the obstacle was, amazingly enough, the Taj Mahal in India. As for Abe’s vertical take-off in the final storm, most real pilots are bound to dislike the idea of anything so horribly contrary to the way planes are meant to fly. All the same this kind of thing really can happen. If anyone doubts me, then I encourage them to read Propellerhead, by Antony Woodward, in which a vertical take-off of exactly this sort is described with extraordinary humour and accuracy. (As a matter of fact, I encourage you to read Propellerhead in any event. It’s a terrific book, with a splendid flavour of the air. It might even get you down to your local airfield for an hour or two’s flying. What did you do last weekend which was more interesting than that?)
The other theme in the book is booze and, once again, I’ve tried to be as accurate as I can. Most people think that A1 Capone was the biggest distributor of booze in the Prohibition era. He wasn’t. That accolade goes to a man named George Remus, the possible model for Gatsby in Fitzgerald’s famous novel. Remus was a larger than life character. He sold more booze than anyone else. His parties were bigger than anyone else’s. When he was finally jailed for his boot-legging he arrived at the jail in spats, a pearl-grey suit and a diamond tie-pin, promising journalists that he planned to lose a little weight while inside.
But the showbiz stuff isn’t what mattered about Remus, or about Prohibition. What mattered then – and matters now – is the effect that one bad law had on the entire nation. In his swaggering prime, Remus had been absolutely confident that he could never be imprisoned. Why? Simply because he had bribed everyone who mattered, right up to the level of the Attorney General himself. Just like my fictional Junius Thornton, George Remus handed out bribes on a colossal scale, including the Prohibition Directors of virtually every state in which he operated. He once stated that in his entire career he only ever found two people who wouldn’t take his bribes: Burt Morgan, the Prohibition Director of Indiana, and Sam Collins, who held the same post in Kentucky. Given the amount of money on offer – quarter of a million dollars in the first case, a hundred thousand bucks in the second – the honesty of this pair does them remarkable credit.
Another common misconception about A1 Capone is that his eventual conviction for tax evasion was somehow a ridiculous fluke, one of history’s little absurdities. It was no such thing. The problem, quite simply, was that the Chicago police force had become so grossly corrupt that no regular type of investigation was going to trap the chief gangsters. While the city had seen well over five hundred gangland homicides by 1930, almost none of them had been successfully prosecuted. Something special was needed, and that special something was the Supreme Court ruling in the Sullivan trial. Following their verdict, criminals were obliged to report and to pay tax on their illegal earnings. Though the Chicago ’untouchables’ were best known for smashing breweries and breaking kegs of whiskey, their most important work was in gathering the evidence that would end up convicting Capone for tax dodging.
And the corruption went all the way. My account of the bar in the Senate isn’t fiction: there really was one, well-stocked and well-attended. There was an office set aside in the basement for the people who handled the alcohol. And bear in mind, this came at a time when the sale of alcohol wasn’t just against the law, it was against the country’s constitution. Meantime, if the lawmakers were bad, the executive arm didn’t have a lot to boast about. Warren Harding became President in 1920, symbolising the American desire for ’normalcy’ after the years of war. But if this was normalcy, then it was the normalcy of the wild west. Here is Alice Roosevelt Longworth, the daughter of a former President, writing about her first trip upstairs to President Harding’s study.
No rumor could have exceeded the reality: the study was filled with cronies … the air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every conceivable brand of whisky stood about, cards and poker chips ready at hand, an atmosphere of waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on desk, and spittoon alongside … [President Harding] was not a bad man. He was just a slob.
To get an accurate picture of how low Prohibition brought the moral authority of America’s governing institutions, you would need to imagine today’s President shooting up in the Oval Office. You’d need to imagine a smack house somehow incorporated into the fabric of the Senate itself. You’d need to imagine that all this was half-known, half-denied by the public at large. When Prohibition finally collapsed it took years to squeeze out the crime which one bad law had fostered.
Glory Boys is the soubriquet I’ve given to a fictional bunch of American fliers. But there are glory boys aplenty in the territory covered by the novel. Sir George Cayley, who worked out how humans were going to conquer flight; the Wright brothers, who went ahead and did it; the fliers and engineers who took things forward; the countless pilots of both sides who died to so little effect in the First World War; and the good guys of Prohibition – the Burt Morgans and the Sam Collinses – who stayed straight no matter how bent the world around them had become: this story is their story. I hope it honours them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GLORY BOYS
Harry Bingham was born in England in 1967. After graduating from Oxford University, he worked as an investment banker for ten years. In 1997, he left banking to care for his disabled wife and to write his first book, The Money Makers. He lives near Oxford with his wife and dogs, and writes full time. To find out more about publications by Harry Bingham, go to www.harpercollins.co.uk and register for AuthorTracker.
OTHER WORKS
By the same author
The Money Makers
Sweet Talking Money
The Sons of Adam
COPYRIGHT
This novel is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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