That's My Novel Car
In which I find an idea made real, figure out an ending, and update a list.
My current work-in-progress novel is set in the early to mid-1930s and at one point in the plot I plan to introduce a futuristic-looking road car with some aerodynamic styling. Several research deep dives later I couldn’t find anything that looked like the car I was visualizing. So I’d resigned myself to it being something I just made up (it is a work of fiction after all). But as it’s a historical novel I really wanted to base the car on something contemporary if possible.
Then this weekend I’m watching the coverage of the annual Goodwood Festival of Speed, and this flashes past.
Wait! What was that? Pause, rewind, and watch again.
That’s it - that’s the car I need for my novel!
The irony is that this streamlined 1930s vehicle is in fact only a year old.
The original concept for a street-legal sports sedan based on the technology of Auto-Union’s race cars was developed and plans drawn up in the mid-1930s. The “Schnellsportwagen,” as it was named, would have been one of the most powerful street-legal vehicles on the road, but it was never built.
A few years ago Audi commissioned a specialist company to use the original documentation and plans to see if the Schnellsportwagen could be built. It was finished last year and made its public debut at last weekend’s Festival of Speed.
You can read more about the project HERE.
It may have been built 90 years after it was designed, but I don’t mind that because it’s going in the book. I found my car!
Alan
Other Stuff
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Brabazon Bits
Thanks to those readers who sent me notes following last week’s newsletter with some great suggestions for how to get the last chapter of the Brabazon book going. All were appreciated.
As it turns out I had already found an approach that I felt would work. All is now completed and the second half of the book is off for proofreading.
Pages and Screens
Books Read in 2024 - “Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider” by Peter Gay
The inter-war Weimar Republic plays a significant part in the back story of several characters in a work-in-progress novel that I mentioned earlier, so I was hoping this would provide some insights into that turbulent era in German history.
Unfortunately, it fell short of what I was looking for as it focused more on intellectual maneuvering than on the impact of the tension between hedonism and militarism on everyday folks.
In the intro to this recent paperback edition, the author states that he chose not to make any changes to his original 1968 text; which is a shame as it relies on too much assumed knowledge of early 20th Century German culture, and over the intervening years I’m sure fewer people (myself included) would understand many of the references.
Many of those references are also presented untranslated which definitely stretched my rarely used minimal German comprehension skills.
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This week I spent some time making sure that our online bookstore at Bookshop.org is fully up to date with the books read so far in 2024, so you can pick up copies of any that interest you, while also helping out local independent bookstores.
You can check it out HERE or by clicking on the image below.
Weekly Web Round-Up
Batman On The Cover - The journey through Batman’s comics publishing history continues this week as we continue working through April 1969 with editions published in Brazil, Denmark, and France.
All are straight reprints, with no real standouts to share this week.
Racing Comics - On one of the British Comics forums there is a daily post of various issues of comics with that day's date. They often include older comics I haven’t seen before and occasionally have motor sports-themed covers.
One that caught my eye this week was a copy of Film Fun from 1957, which sported a teaser box on its masthead for what looks to be the adaptation of a movie called Thundering Wheels.
Film Fun as the title suggests was primarily filled with comedy strips relating to movie stars such as Laurel & Hardy, Charlie Chaplin etc., and the occasional cowboy adventure starring Roy Rogers or Gene Autrey. It wasn’t a title I associated with any potential racing-related strips so I hadn’t looked into it.
Now it looks like I have another research project ahead of me.
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See you next time
Alan J. Porter
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