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FOREWORD

In the last week of May 2006 I decided to burn my life down.

The weather was warm, the sky was blue, and to the casual observer it probably seemed that my world did not particularly need torching. I was thirty-eight, had worked as a producer, director and writer in television for almost twenty years and in that time I had travelled the world, won some awards, made a good living and carved a fairly decent if unspectacular career. I had a lovely wife, a funny, clever little three year old with blonde ringlets and huge green eyes, and my baby boy had just been born. And it was the baby, in the end, that made me reach for the matches.

At the time of his birth I was producing a sort of talent show for inventors called ‘The Big Idea’, which was about as good as it sounds. And because it was live and because when you’re employed by someone else you have to do what they tell you, I wasn’t allowed to take any time off. My son had just been born and I couldn’t be there, not for him, not for my wife and not for my daughter, whose world had been invaded by a tiny, bald, crying thing.

I managed to sneak a few days at home – most of which I spent on the phone to the production office – and as I juggled a sleeping baby and a phone so hot it was cooking my ear, just to make a programme no one was going to see, I felt a growing sense of anger and frustration. I could sense the ghost of my eighteen-year-old self, watching me from the shadows, his brow knitted in fury and confusion, his unlined face incredulous at what he had become. That version of me had envisaged novels and film scripts and movies in his future. That version had a deep love of language and a desire to use it to tell stories, big stories on grand, vivid canvasses. He had not imagined arriving at the sharp end of thirty to find himself writing weak jokes about nerds in sheds for a cable channel. Something had to change.

The first thing I did was talk it all through with my wife, who, being lovely, realised that I was deeply unhappy and needed to do something about it, even though we now had two small mouths to feed as well as too big a mortgage on a house that was not quite big enough. She did a deal with me. She said she’d give me five years or three books to try and make a go of it. In that time I would spend six months of each year writing and the other six doing freelance TV jobs to bring some money in. Suddenly there was light in my professional darkness. We started saving and I began to think about what sort of story I was going to write. I also began to read lots of thrillers.

I have always loved thrillers, I love the mechanics of them and the addictive nature of reading a good one. The narrative structure of commercial television is not dissimilar. In both you have to grab the reader or viewer and hold on to them as tightly as you can, constantly re-engaging them and staying one or two steps ahead.