Peter – originally a journalist who became a scriptwriter, then producer of the Gaelic drama Machair, before embracing fiction – turned down contract offers for another book. Writer Peter May, returned with a new thriller embracing the challenge of setting it in the near future. The engines were put under wraps and sat untouched in the works yard for several years until one day they mysteriously disappeared. None of us have a voice. I have one tiny little voice in a sea of growling humanity!” Peter said, recalling that frustration. The evening covered crime writing in the form of TV series and films, as well as books, and there were awards for productions and acting as well as writing so there were numerous awards. The wine was flowing, the hours were passing, no-one was allowed to leave as the event was being recorded for television.

In the end, it was another six years before I returned. But this time I had a story, and a precious introduction to the Chinese police from a man revered by the country’s top cops. It’s easy to wax lyrical about the service that the enthusiasts who ran these stores provided for readers by offering good advice and astute recommendations, but speaking from personal experience the hosting they provided for authors will be difficult to replace. I’ve been writing all my life and for the last 10 to 20 years, I’ve just been writing a book a year or more and travelling for promotion all over the world and it is exhausting. It was getting too much.”It was dated January 25th, 1971, which seemed auspicious since it was also the birthday of the great Scottish Bard, Rabbie Burns. I had an extraordinary sense of having arrived somewhere special, a society preserved as in aspic, and I knew immediately that I wanted to write about it. Those of you who have read my thriller, “Coffin Road”, will know that some of the action takes place on one of a group of tiny islands twenty miles off the west coast of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. The story is set in Spain, where a Scottish police officer has been seconded to the Spanish authorities to assist with the manhunt for a fugitive from British justice.

Confined to France and a 40 km radius from our home, I had to come up with a new idea, and so The Night Gate was conceived. A new adventure for Enzo Macleod, it has two timelines, one present day and one during the second world war, mainly set in and around Carennac and Saint-Céré, and other places I know well in France. One scene even takes place in the apartment above the garage which is now my music studio where, in reality during the war, many works of art from the Louvre were hidden from the Nazis! Happy New Year! And I’m happy to announce the publication of The Man With No Face. This book was originally written and published in 1981, it’s a fast-moving political thriller is set in 1979 but is contemporary in its themes, which is why my editor suggested it was time for a new edition. Cast Iron– the sixth and final book in the Enzo Files series – will be published in hard cover edition in North America on October 3rd.I began research on the subject and discovered that it was more prevalent than one might expect. There are nearly 400,000 sufferers around the world, with that figure expected to rise to 600,000 in the next fifteen years. One of the most common causes is a genetic disease known as Usher Syndrome in which the victim develops partial or total hearing loss that worsens over time. I left Beijing empty-handed on that trip, but had learned a great deal, and was even more determined to use China as a setting for my next book. No one had set a crime thriller in Beijing at that point, just as no one had used Moscow as a setting before Gorky Park. I was absolutely intent on being the first to do it in China. The new set-up was so successful that the interviews and book talks continued into April and that’s when things became very complicated. A Silent Death will be published in January 2020, and before its publication, I thought I would share some of the research and development that went into the writing of the book. Join me at any of these events from anywhere in the world and hear me speak about the story behind “ The Night Gate” and the return of Enzo…