The Samuel Carver Files
12 December 2008
People always told me that the second book was the hardest. The first has every good idea that’s ever been stored away over years and years of dreaming. Then someone publishes it, and says, ‘OK, now we need a sequel.’ And they need it within a year. But you don’t have any more ideas.
That’s when the fear kicks in.
Actually, I did have an idea for the book that became The Survivor. I wanted to … actually I won’t say what I wanted to do, because I might still do it, if I ever get to the point when I can tell my publishers, ‘I don’t care if you think that the American public isn’t ready for this. This is what they’re getting.’
Sadly, that point is a long way off, but you never know what might happen.
Be that as it may, I’d had this idea, and in the course of thinking about it I’d seen an article in Vanity Fair about the huge influence of radical Christian fundamentalism in America, and that culture’s obsession with the End of Days. That led me on to researching the FBI’s Project Megiddo, which was a pre-Millennium investigation into fears that some Christian groups might just be nuts enough to celebrate the Year 2000 by trying to jump-start Armageddon themselves.
Meanwhile, I was thinking about the fact that my first book The Accident Man, which was about the assassination of an unnamed princess in a Parisian tunnel, ended on 6 September 1997. I needed to find another news event at around that time that would make a good backdrop to the sequel, and that led me to thinking about the Kosovo crisis, which was just beginning to kick off.
A second news-link cropped up when I was investigating weapons that might cause Armageddon. I stumbled upon an internet story about a Russian general, Alexander Lebed, who had gone on American TV on 7 September 1997 – the very day after Accident Man ended, in other words – and announced that his country had lost track of at least 100 miniature nuclear bombs, or ‘suitcase nukes’. That was far too perfect a coincidence to ignore.
And all the while, of course, Osama bin-Laden was sitting in Afghanistan, plotting the attack that would become 9/11.
Those various strands wove together in my mind to provide the true-life backdrop to my fictional story. But they had nothing to do with the real emotional heart of The Survivor, which is the continuing relationship (or want of it) between the hero Samuel Carver and the woman he loves, Alix Petrova. Nor did they solve the problem that would dog me, and my editors, agent and anyone else who came near the manuscript over the next 18 months. To wit: how do you write a fast-paced action thriller when the hero is confined to bed, in a state of semi-comatose, amnesiac trauma, inflicted by the torture that seemed like such a great way to end the first book?
Whether I solved the problem I leave to readers to judge. But I can say this: I’m now three-quarters of the way through Book 3. And it doesn’t get any easier!
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