‘Spy Without a Cause’: Interview with the author
Q. What is this book about?
A. Against a background of corruption and tax avoidance, a businessman is confronted with personal greed, kleptocracy, espionage and murder as matters move, Eric Ambler style, out of his control. It is set in Hong Kong, Manila and Singapore.
Q. What is the inspiration behind this book?
A. I wanted to draw on my time spent in the region to try and weave a complicated story involving complex characters in locations that I knew from my own experience. There are themes of corruption – on an individual and state level – that I wanted to explore as well as looking at the political, economic and foreign policy dimensions.
Q. What can you tell us about the main characters?
A. The book features a young publisher, Richard Rowlands, and, early on, he crosses the path of Jimmy Chan, who is a constant presence in the book. I wanted a certain innocence in Richard Rowlands, but not the ingenuous, flaky sort, so that as the plot develops and he gets mixed up in all kinds of crookedness and subterfuge, he remains sympathetic in such a central role.
There are quite a few interesting characters on offer in the book and I’ve provided a Who’s Who at the start of the book to help pinpoint them. I also had a lot of fun doing an Afterword to the novel, which acts like those listings at the end of some films which tell you what happened to the main characters in life after the film, or in this case, their lives after the book.
Q. The book is set in the 1980s. Why?
A. I realised that my experiences in the Far East happened at a very interesting period of recent history. Hong Kong was still British, China was opening up, Marcos was in power in the Philippines, Lee Kuan Yew still held sway in Singapore and Western foreign policies had left legacies in SE Asia with ramifications throughout the area. Not only that, but international currency, tax avoidance and money-laundering activities were growing in importance and having a malign effect on people and places.
Curiously enough, a lot of what is explored in the novel in relation to China has particular resonance with more recent realisations about that country’s aims and ambitions, and, somewhat fortuitously, I had tried in the book to give all that an historical context.
Q. How did you choose the title?
A. I wanted to capture the idea of someone inadvertently being swept along by events and I also suppose the title of the film Rebel Without a Cause was a trigger.
Q. What research did you do for the book?
A. A lot! I read a great deal about the financial aspects (of money laundering and tax avoidance) and espionage in the region. I researched the Marcos regime’s corruption and read about the roots of China’s antipathy toward the West. Added to that, I had kept a lot of information from my travels, including, would you believe, things like receipts. Drawing on my memory, boosted by relevant contemporaneous guidebooks and other paraphernalia, I was able to reconstruct the places as they were at the time. A lot of the publishing business aspects I knew from first-hand knowledge.
I like to think it all made for a realistic setting in which to place the fictional events and people.
Q. Do you have any plans for a sequel?
A. Yes and no. In the Afterword to the novel, I allude to a possible follow up, Meet Me in Mogadishu, which would reunite some of the main characters again, but this time featuring China’s influence in East Africa. But, as Richard Rowlands states in the Afterword that it will be ‘a genre-busting dystopian sci-fi crime noir spy murder mystery romcom’, you can tell that I am tongue-in-cheek about it!
However, I do want to return to the financial skulduggery theme and I am working on The Bermuda Bond set on, er, Bermuda, a place I know very well, so watch this space.