Dugald Bruce Lockhart

All right, this is going to be good, isn't it?

Put that effing book down.

When it comes to crime, only murder will do.

I'm reading it and reading it and I'm going, oh no.

So I thought I really have to hook the reader.

Thank you indeed, and a very good morning and a good evening to you at the same time.

Okay, so there was two reasons for this.

The first thing, the story is actually inspired by a trip that I took when I was 20 in 1988.

During my summer holidays, I went on a solo trip to Paris.

And I got myself in all sorts of scrapes, but nothing like in the book, I hasten to add, it is not in any way autobiographical.

But I decided to give it the framework, a framing of someone who wasn't sure about their identity, where they were going, and someone who was out to try and prove himself.

And so the character to begin with is, he's intellectual, he's wily, but he's very green in terms of his wildlife experiences.

And I really wanted to see how far, kind of like in Heart of Darkness, the novel Heart of Darkness, you get the character who is effectively innocent and well-intentioned,

and how far they would go in order to try and prove himself the man that he thinks his ex-girlfriend, who dumped him, wants him to be.

And by a sequence of sliding door events, he ends up in trouble that he never planned.

And my aim was to write it in such a way that if the reader were in the same spot, they'd go, well, fair enough, I would do that too.

And then gradually, as time passes on, he becomes another beast altogether.

I think it's two things.

I mean, I was brought up also in Cyprus.

I went to boarding school eventually after the age of eight and a half.