What the author says:
Early in any writer’s career, they will be advised, “write what you know”.
Well, up to a point.
I would put it another way, “draw on what you know, and draw on what you love”.
In my first novel, Impeccable Sources, I drew on both. I loved my career as a newspaper reporter, and I knew how Fleet Street worked. This was recognised in many of the reviews it received.
My latest offering, Dancing to Domino, again reflects both knowledge and love, and binds them together.
I was born in the East End of London during WW2. We were not poor, we were not rich, just ordinary. I was loved and given a great deal of freedom. It was a close-knit community: for instance my best friend’s stepmother had been my mother’s schoolmate. The same friend’s first girlfriend was the daughter of my mother’s first boyfriend. It was that sort of place, and people really did look out for each other.
This childhood is reflected in the parts of Dancing to Domino, set in 1950’s East London.
A later love I discovered as an adult was the love of open space and of messing about in boats. I am at my happiest, I suppose, on a small boat on a river or an estuary. Rivers, estuaries, they offer amazing landscapes, constantly changing as one trolls along, sails full and the soft gurgle of water against the hull.
This, too, is what Jack Boyer, my protagonist, finds. Jack is not me, and I am not Jack. He is product of what my dear friend, Lindsay Clarke, would describe as my creative imagination.
But I have grown to love him, and I think you will too.
Dancing to Domino is available from all good bookshops, from Bookshop.org, or directly from my publisher, Matador.
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/contemporary/dancing-to-domino/
It is also available as an E-book on all the usual platforms