The best detectives work on faith that they’ll be up to the task of
solving the crime, at least my lead character Lieutenant Alex
Delillo does. Solving crime and writing in that sense is a perfect
match. There’s nothing scarier than typing number one on the
first page of a manuscript. There’s no map, no instruction
manual that will help you find your way to the end. But you have
to believe that you will get there. As the early cartographers said;
beyond this point there be dragons.
Where do you begin to formulate your story? For me, it all begins with
an idea.
No cop, in the middle of a warm Southern Californian night, would walk into
an empty football ball stadium where a frozen body lies wrapped in a sleeping bag
and think they know how the case is going to progress.
This leads to questions and it is Alex’s job to answer the questions the victim poses.
Who is she and how did she get there? Why is she dead? Is this a murder that began
as an idea in the twisted psyche of a serial killer? Or is there more to the story? Is her
death part of a plan that has yet to be implemented or even one that has slipped out
of the darkness of the past and touched the present? Or
is it both?
Don’t Look Back is absolutely right as Delillo
comes to realise that this isn’t the past found in
the pages of a scrapbook – there are no
happy snapshots here. This is a past that will
reach out and pull her and you, in to places
you never wanted to go and in ways not
even she, or I at the time I started writing
the book, could ever imagine.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I
enjoyed writing it.
