2029 The book that predicted the pandemic and recession.

My wife and I, Alexander and Barnaby, used to go to Cornwall every summer for a week with my in-laws, staying in the charmingly named Portwrinkle, in the forgotten corner of Cornwall that most people whizzed past on their way to Newquay, Padstow, Rock or St. Ives. Often, we would stay in an old-fashioned hotel called The Whitsand Bay Hotel. My father-in-law was a keen golfer and there were stunning views over the bay. The hotel would be used as the backdrop to the denouement where Aubrey comes face to face with his nemesis Terence Lawless.

I had the ending, but I needed the beginning and the middle. I imagined a post-Brexit Britain that had a terrible recession and a severe epidemic, the ‘Virulent Virus’, this was two years before ‘Covid 19’ struck. As a result of economic collapse and deaths, people had resorted to bartering goods and smuggling as the currency became worthless.

I had my villain, Terence Lawless, who, like any good entrepreneur, turned smuggling into a successful business. My conceit was that his armed security men had annexed large parts of rural Cornwall to create his own personal fiefdom. My setting was complete, an annexed port for the smugglers where high-powered, black boats travelled fast and dodged the Royal Navy, much as they used to between Morocco and Spain in the 1980s. Based in Gibraltar, I had witnessed sailors filling bullet holes in similar black boats in the harbour while I was on ‘Waterwitch’ in 1982. A book has multiple layers of the author’s history in every page.

My main character was named after one of the charming sons of the family featured in Major Bruton’s Safari with whom I had travelled to Uganda, and I added some of the naïve teenage habits of my youth to him. Then, the plot was easy.

Drawing ideas from books such as ‘Moonfleet and ‘Jamaica Inn’, as well as others from the smugglers genre, I came up with the family mausoleum and a fishing-net type trap.

I wanted Aubrey to be confounded by a strong female character. Creating Adele who lost an eye in a food riot and who works for Terence Lawless was my first task. She would be the woman Aubrey would fall for and who he hoped, in his naïve, teenage way, would fall in love with him. However, the charming and likeable son of Terence gets in the way.

Aubrey needed an ally to help him escape. She appears as the shopkeeper, Kate. Like Adele, she is strong and dynamic, but she also has an acerbic sense of humour. She helps Aubrey escape after he is wrongly accused of being partly responsible for Freddie’s drowning. The third and final strong character is a Ugandan officer, Thomasina Mutesa, working for the Administration, the new government. She is manipulative and powerful and of course Aubrey falls madly in love with her only to discover she is a marionette, and he is her puppet.