I’m not sure where Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith aka “Smithy” stands in the name-recognition stakes these days, but one upon a time the Brisbane-born aviator was one of the most famous Australians in the world.

This war hero turned Hollywood stunt pilot first garnered national attention in 1927 with a record-breaking flight around Australia with Charles Ulm. Over the next few years Smithy would consistently break or create aviation records across the Pacific, the Tasman and the Atlantic, as well as long slabs of desert, mountains and jungle.

He would also crash (or almost crash) fairly often; establish his own airline; get caught up in various lawsuits, scandals and far-right politics; receive a knighthood; battle bureaucrats and financiers; get divorced and remarried; have a patchy record delivering the mail; and be forced to give joy flights to pay the bills before disappearing somewhere in the Indian Ocean in November 1935.

The life (and death) of Smithy has since been immortalised in the form of currency, films, documentaries, radio dramas, airport and road names, a miniseries, various biographies and now a novel from Damien Lay, titled Of Air and Men.

Lay is best known as a documentary filmmaker, his credits including The Battle of Long Tan. He has long had an interest in the Kingsford-Smith story, spending many years trying to find Smithy’s final resting place. While there seems little doubt Smithy and his co-pilot Tommy Pethybridge died after crashing into the ocean, the exact when, where, why and how remains a mystery.

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Of Air and Men focuses on the lead up to Smithy’s death, including his battles with officialdom, struggles to pay the bills and determination to promote aviation. Smithy’s wife Mary is a key figure, as is Pethybridge (a nice correction, as he’s often overshadowed by other short-lived co-pilots like Charles Ulm and Keith Anderson in accounts of Smithy’s life).

There are cameos from people such as Hollywood director Victor Fleming, Japanese Emperor Hirohito, Adolph Hitler, Smithy’s son Charles, and the author himself, Damien Lay, which is very meta.

There are even chapters of Lay exploring for Smithy’s wreckage off the coast of Myanmar, so I guess you could call this book historical, biographical and autobiographical fiction.

There’s also a brief appearance of a Kingsford-Smith biographer character called Richard Mack Simmons, who is described as “celebrated, ego prone and unapologetically theatrical”, that made me wonder if Lay was having a swipe at Peter Fitzsimmons, whose tome Charles Kingsford Smith and those magnificent men had a far racier depiction of Smithy than that in Of Air and Men.

Lay offers up a reasonable theory in the novel as to exactly how Smithy and Pethybridge died, although (SPOILERS) it’s basically “crashed into the ocean” – there’s no “Smitty was secretly a Japanese spy” kind of twist.

His book appears (to my layperson’s eye) to be very well researched, although it offers no footnotes, sources or even an explanatory introduction or postscript, which might have been useful accompaniment, particularly as the author is a character in his own novel. Some maps showing Smithy’s travels also would have been handy.

Lay is a skilled writer with a particular gift for action scenes such Smithy’s plane crashing into the ocean, the aviator’s experiences at Gallipoli and the last few hours of Smithy and Pethybridge.

He is less strong on characterisation, although he handles the increasing stresses on Smithy very well. The cover art – a small toy car – is a little odd for a book about an aviator, although the good reason for it is revealed in the final chapter. Of Air and Men, written with passion and skill, is a worthy addition to the field of Smithy-ology.

Of Air and Men by Damien Lay, Busybird Publishing, from $24.74. 

Available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and booksellers worldwide.