In mid-2019 I was sitting alone in my favourite Italian bar in Hong Kong - 'La Piola' on Hennessy Rd in Wan Chai, now sadly closed. It was a typical steamy summer night and I was drinking an Aperol Spritz, watching the world go by when a light bulb went off in my head. I would write a novel! I had alway wanted to write and, besides, how hard could it be?
Maybe it was the Aperol but the idea came to me in a torrent over the next 30 minutes, like a Hong Kong typhoon breaking over my head, and the first thing I did was call my old mate (and author of the 'Intrepid' series) Chris Allen. I remember he didn't say much as I rattled on about my idea: I wanted to write a detective novel, a modern re-telling of the classic detective novels of Raymond Chandler, James Cain, John D. McDonald, and Dashiell Hammett. Old school. I wanted my protagonist to be 'different' somehow (that point of difference came to me almost immediately that evening), and I wanted him hard-boiled but flawed. It had to be set in Hong Kong and it had to be gritty and real. About all I remember Chris saying after I finally stopped to draw breath was something like "Well, you best get on with it, hadn't you." So I drank into the night, by now scribbling thoughts onto the back of beer coasters with a pen borrowed from the barman. At one point I thought I should record the scene for posterity so I shot the below video with my iPhone...I'm glad I did.
Hennessy Rd, Wan Chai, La Piola, the night Galahad Jones was born
My writing method is for another post, but I had no idea at the time what the big 'what if' - the main plot line - would be but I knew it wouldn't take long to come to me and I was right. Perhaps it had been sitting in there for years but in less than a week I had a good idea of what I wanted the arc of the story and its main elements to be and, roughly, how my protagonist would get tangled up in it. So started nearly eight months of wondering around Hong Kong with a moleskin notebook and pencil always at hand, sketching out plot ideas, characterisation, scenes, narrative 'problems' and their resolution, and generally just creating the new world into which I was about to step. I spent nearly every waking moment - and a great deal of my sleep - considering the book in all its many complexities and that, of course, continued once I had opened my laptop, started a new document and typed the first words... "I shifted the weight on my feet and leaned further back into the darkened doorway." The rest, as they say, is history...
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A.C.
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