On the last page of new thriller Nomad, my final words about the novel are these: “This book was written on location in London, New York City and Norfolk.” I put that in there when I finished the first draft, as a kind of joke aimed at myself – an echo of those last bits of text you see scrolling up the screen when a movie ends, listing all the places where they shot it.
I left the reference in, forgot about it even, but it was only after the book had become a real, physical object that I came across that sentence again – and I started to think about how those places had affected how I write.
London is my home town, a city I feel close to and energised by. Important pieces of Nomad take place there, so I had the freedom to down tools anytime I wanted to and walk the streets to get a sense of something, whether it was plotting out the route of a chase sequence through Waterloo station or a tense stand-off in the halls of a gentleman’s club in the West End.
And back in my office was where I did most of the heavy lifting in writing this story; it’s a wide room at the rear of my home that looks out on to gardens and trees, but I’m slotted into one small corner of it between a wall and a filing cabinet – the rest is filled with bookshelves and boxes!
A friend and fellow writer, whose own preferred working space is open plan and airy, referred to my niche as looking like the cockpit of a jet fighter. That’s an analogy I can certainly work with, because there are those days when writing feels like you have to strap in and apply full thrust to get it airborne.
New York gave me an impetus that was quite different from London’s, even as they shared a lot of the same urban dynamism. I was out there in a small apartment near Hell’s Kitchen for an unseasonably warm October, catching up with fellow authors from the Big Apple and soaking up the crackling vitality all around me.
In between ranging around Central Park and riding the length of Manhattan on the subway, New York gently convinced me to restage one of my key sequences in a location across the Hudson River when I saw it from a skyscraper window. And as any writer will tell you, whenever you’re writing one thing, your author brain will immediately start giving you ideas for another thing; I later mined my experiences of that month in NYC for the opening chapters of Deadline, a novel based on the television series, 24.
In Norfolk, it was the quiet and the isolation that served me best. I was house-sitting, alone and isolated for weeks at a time in a tiny, blink-and-you-miss it village, with only two indifferent cats for company. The internet connection was slow, and the days were long and largely silent. I could have been on a remote island somewhere for all the human contact I had – but the total lack of distractions gave me the mental open space to wrangle the last half of my novel into a shape I was happy with. By the time I reconnected to the rest of the world, I had a book.
Nomad is my take on the high-octane action thrillers of my youth, with a digital-age spin for our post-Snowden, post-Wikileaks world – and like the works of the writers who inspired me, it has international reach. Through the course of the story, Nomad’s fugitive protagonist Marc Dane goes from the French coast to Sicily, from Rome to the wilds of Turkey, before ending up in a race against time along America’s eastern seaboard that culminates in an explosive finale in Washington DC.
I tried to make sure as much as I could that every place he went, the streets he walked and the air he breathed, was a place that I had been to myself. In these days of voluminous online databases, of real-time maps and street views from almost anywhere on Earth, it’s possible for a writer to virtually stand on a street corner and see what their character might see, or find someone of such experience to draw from.
But there is an ephemeral something that experience brings to having been there. I like to think of it as a sense of gravity to the place, an understanding of how the air moves and the world turns around you. How does it feel to have sand from that particular beach get in your shoes? Is the air dry or damp in that backstreet? What does it sound like, smell like?
And it’s worth noting, these are things that don’t have to actually be in the story you write. But there is certainly a sense of confidence that comes through an author’s work when they’re drawing on memory as much as invention, a conviction that makes the story feel all that more real. Because location is as much about where you are as where your head is at.
Nomad is published by Zaffre, £12.99
