Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron – old style, classic travel writing with lovely prose and a very humane approach to travel. The exact opposite of those travel books where people take kitchen appliances with them on their travels. I also loved Rubicon by Tom Hollander about Rome – I don’t feel the need to read Imperium now. In thrillers, I thought Lifeless by Mark Billingham was a cop writer at the top of his game, I liked the spooky arctic setting for The Trudeau Vector by Juris Jurjevics and (I’m very slow here, I know), I just discovered a great book by Lionel Davidson called Kolminsky Heights. However, top of the list is The Last Supper by Charles McCarry. That and his Old Boys make a perfect combo. They are international spy thrillers, but, like early Le Carre, they just read as if they are  written by a man who has been there. And he has.

 

I think being a travel writer certainly fed through because I found a lot of the locations for the earlier books while on assignment. My unhealthily large collection of Commando comics (now disposed of) probably had a detrimental effect however.

 

Usually, although it has changed once or twice during the process of writing and editing. In some cases, and AFTER SUNRISE comes into this category, it is the ending (actually the mismatched dogfight, slightly before the last chapter) that makes me want to write the book. It sort of pulls you through. In the next book, DYING DAY, there was a twist I wanted to try and pull off to make the reader go: ‘ blimey, I didn’t see that coming’, and, again, that’s a powerful engine.

 

Two things. The idea that the British were running a black market currency scam under the noses of the Americans in China in WW2 and that it netted a king’s ransom and the men who flew the supply routes over the Himalayas. Plus a remarkable woman called Lorna McAlister who had experienced things and told me here story.

 

I think AFTER MIDNIGHT was a smaller, more intimate story, about people picking up the pieces left by WW2. This one has a similar arc, but the stage is much larger, from Burma to China and India.

 

Anyone who likes a good adventure story with a few twists and turns along the way. It is really a heist novel (pot of gold) with a love story (although the hero isn’t sure whether he loves a real women or the memory of another, lost one).