Paradise Island, my new standalone thriller, has been a long
time coming. I first had the idea for a
story set on one of the Georgia and Carolina Barrier Isles when I visited
several as part of a mammoth one year trek around America way back in 1978. I was trying to write The Great Novel back
then so parked the idea of something bad happening on one of these isolated
islands in a half page of my notebook.
The rest of the notebook was full
of deeply significant ruminations on the human condition – a.k.a pretentious
twaddle – with bad poetry thrown in. I
dumped The Great Novel all this horrible stuff was going to go in the minute I
got back to England. Although, had I
known Morrissey was going to have that kind of turgid rubbish published as a
Penguin Classic years later, I might have persevered.
Anyway, fast forward to the
nineteen nineties and a journalist friend, who was a large part of the
inspiration for Bridget in my Nick Madrid comic crime novels (for those of you
with long memories), bought a place on one of the Barrier Isles and reignited
my interest in them.
I started making notes for this
thriller between writing the Nick Madrid silliness. Then I started writing it in earnest in the
early Noughties. Then I put it aside because I had this idea
for a complicated, confusingly plotted trilogy of novels set in Brighton that
would infuriate as many readers as it pleased because I wasn’t going for the
big resolutions in book one or book two and then only obliquely in book
three. (I do have a book on essential
rules for writing a crime bestseller but haven’t read it.)
Anyway, five books into my
Brighton trilogy I yearned for those barrier isle breakers and freshwater
alligators and humidity that turned me into a human sprinkler – and the And
Then There Were None idea of a closed community cut off from the rest of the
world.
Mobile phones and wifi are a
major problem for that kind of scenario to work but I was also feeling
nostalgic for the heady couple of years I spent in America (I stayed on into
1979 too) when I still had hair and punk and New Wave were colliding with the
old guard and Bob Marley was bringing reggae into the mainstream. (I played five a side soccer with Marley a
couple of times but that is definitely another story.)
I wanted to write an American
novel. An Elmore Leonard, Harlan Coben, Robert Crais kind of thing. (Yeah, I know - don’t
we all?) Cleanly plotted, with a kind of narrative that has an inevitability about it because actions have reactions and consequences
– but, of course, with twists. Set in 1978 (and 1970). Told
through three or four characters. A
former big city cop with a shameful secret.
A heist crew with a lunatic among them.
A WitSec guy whose bloody past is catching up with him as someone comes
onto the island to kill him. Oh and a
Brit couple recovering from a savage house invasion who’ve come to the island
for quiet and recuperation. Good luck
with that.
So I did write it. I havered between titles. For ages it was called The
Boogaloo Twist but I also liked Paradise Island. I decided to keep the former for something
else I’m writing. Paradise Island it
is.
I hope it’s a fast read because I
hope it’s a page-turner. I’ve decided to
publish it as an e-book original to see how that might work. A snip at $4.99. Now back to the sixth book of the Brighton trilogy.
