Nicholas Shakespeare

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

When it comes to crime, only murder will do.

It's a pleasure.

Well, that's very nice to have your reaction.

I mean, I wanted to write deliberately a thriller that you couldn't put down.

I'm not really an expert in thrillers, but I set it around a prep school in Oxford where I had been and where my mother had been and where my grandfather, who was an English teacher, taught.

And I thought I'd kind of anchor it in some of my own biography, but not too much.

So I have a character who has been a foreign correspondent in Latin America for many years until the newspaper closes his office down.

And he comes back with his 11-year-old son with a legacy, instructed by his favorite art to send his son to the school where she was, too.

So he comes back after an absence of many years to a completely unrecognizable place.

place where it's now used by the international rich to launder their children.

Whereas in his day, it had been really for the children of the middle classes who never traveled beyond the Midlands and never really took a holiday abroad.

So all the countries that are represented by the modern rich parents, he only knew about through the stamps in his stamp album.

So I wanted to kind of reflect

It's a requiem for the old school that I knew and a kind of goggle-eyed look at modern education.

And I realised as I was living there, and I did the same thing to my two boys who also went there, and I would sit, stand rather, on the touchline watching them play rather bad football against vastly superior teams in the rain on a Thursday afternoon.

And the only other people on the touchline were other fathers.

And these were colossally wealthy people who'd come without their security guards.

And they found it intolerable to be standing on a rainy afternoon on a remote playing field beside somebody who didn't know who they were.

And so they started to talk to me, thinking I was one of them, rather than an impoverished novelist who was able also to get away to watch their son play.