How does it feel when you kill your child? Not good, but sometimes a man’s got to do...

Oz Blackstone sprang full-formed to fictional life in the mid-1990s. In Blackstone’s Pursuits, his first adventure, he was a happy- go-lucky lad around Edinburgh, looking thirty in the face with no trepidation, with a nice little private enquiry business to sustain his lifestyle and no ambition beyond the next weekend. I liked him then. But in the first chapter of his first proper adventure he met a like-minded temptress called Primavera Phillips and everything changed.

Blackstone’s Pursuits was what in the US they’d call a cosy. Oz and Prim were sent on a mission to recover some appropriated cash; they travelled across France, found the money and came face to face with the bad guy. And they killed him. It couldn’t be helped, it was him or them, but they killed him. That’s when the series stopped being cosy, when Oz’s life changed, and his career was stood on its head as he rushed headlong into fame and fortune, acquiring all the ruthlessness both can bring.

In the succeeding eight books, Oz became a very serious dude, so dark that he wasn’t averse to leaving a few more bodies behind. His nadir came when he ordered the killing of an ex-girlfriend and her dad. That’s when he and I fell out for good, when I realised that I could not put up with his behaviour any longer. Bad news for Oz, for authors are, of course, omnipotent. I did spend some time trying to work out how to change him for the better, but there was no simple answer, in fact, no answer at all.

So Oz died. It wasn’t easy for me, but I steeled myself and I killed my own creation. The extent of my mercy was to allow him to die off stage, somewhere between For the Death of Me, and Inhuman
Remains, the first of a new series featuring the revived, reformed Primavera, who acquired two
things from Oz during their brief period as a married couple: his surname and their son, Tom, with whom she lives on the Catalan coast, making a new life, but with the old one still at the back of her mind.

Hopefully she’ll stay on my good side.

Best wishes,

Quintin Jardine