Bob Judd

I've published ten books, mostly thrillers. Good training for A Mighty Fool Stunt.

Back in the late 70's when the snap above was taken, I'd just published my first book, "How to Fall Out of Love" (still in print) and quit advertising to write full time.

Three years later, not starving but almost, I was lured back to be an International Vice President and Creative Director at J. Walter Thompson, then the largest advertising agency in the world.

I went to London and ran back and forth across Europe carrying storyboards and layouts for Ford Of Europe, the largest ad account in Europe. If someone wasn't yelling at me, I thought something must be really wrong.

Then one spring, coming back from a holiday in Portugal, I picked up a copy of The New York Times to learn that J. Walter had been sold and lost the Ford account. And that's when I became a novelist.

I'd shot some 30 TV commercials with three-time world champion racing driver Jackie Stewart. Shooting a commercial involves a lot of sitting around waiting (for the light to be right, the set to be built, the director to set up a shot) and Jackie loves to talk. At one point, during a Turbo T-bird shoot in California, he said that when he was driving really well, he always had plenty of time.

That floored me. I'd driven racing cars, and I never had any time at all, arriving at corners, in Jackie's phrase, "in a flurry of feathers and blood."

But Jackie's mind was faster than the fastest racing cars in the world. He could divide time into thousandths of a second. Which is a long way of saying that Stewart led me to the power of telling a story in the first person. The way to make racing or any story come alive was to tell it in the first person.

So I wrote my first novel, Formula One. I gave the manuscript to Jackie and he took it with him on a flight from London to San Francisco. "You've done it, Bob," Jackie wrote on a postcard. "You are the Dick Francis of motor racing."

The book had some success in Europe and the Far East but remains unknown in America where readers tend to think Formula One is "probably a hair tonic." I wrote more novels and for a few minutes, I was mildly famous. I moved from London to California and covered Formula One racing for Road & Track magazine, was the motor racing editor for Quokka, an innovative online magazine in the early days of the internet.

When my Uncle John Logan died age 96, he left a diary of his great adventure.. He'd always wanted to write the book. He had boxes full of newspaper clippings, photographs, telegrams and articles he had written.

But he couldn't write the book because he had already written it. That diary, written in pencil every night by the fire is so alive, so fresh with the passion of a young man lost in the wilderness.

I thought it was brilliant and asked my cousins if I could turn it into a book.

When I went to Alaska to retrace his route, I got stuck in Chicken. You should know Chicken is called Chicken because the miners back in the gold rush couldn't spell ptarmigan.

Despite the promising name, when I got there in May, 2014, the first food truck of spring hadn't arrived and the road ahead was blocked. The road back to the nearest meal was around a hundred miles. I had a few cans with me in my camper. A can of soup a day was a lot more that John Logan got to eat on his way to Chicken.

"We never missed a meal, but sometimes we got a few days behind," he liked to say.