Many years ago, Mike and I mis-spent our youth around the greyhound tracks of London. In 2017, Mike died and as a way of reconnecting with those times I researched what had happened to the stadiums. They’ve all gone now but one closure story caught my eye – Catford in 2003. The sudden-ness and the circumstances were weird and suspicious to say the least. I thought, ‘there’s a story here.’
I guess many of us wonder about the paths in life we could have taken but did not. Chance and a misplaced willingness to please my parents had diverted me away from literature into a business career but the ambition to write always buzzed away like a wasp around my head.
And so the idea of Catford Dogs was born. And over a couple of years it developed into an unruly toddler and a difficult teenager before the brilliant editor Rich Arcus took it in hand and made it grow up. And now I’m a proud parent.
Inside the book…….
There are very bad people who do unspeakable stuff to good people. There’s greed, violence, murder, blackmail and bribery. Good people make bad decisions. There are some fast dogs, and a really ugly dog. There’s some sex, involving people who really shouldn’t be doing it together. There is humour about stuff that nice people don’t joke about.
At its’ heart the book is about how one man reacts when twin Exocets blow his dozy (and damaging) inertia to smithereens. He’s a hero that you may not like much at the outset, but perhaps by the end you’ll be rooting for him.
As well as attempting to entertain with a compelling crime story, I wanted to create plausible characters with depth and a strong sense of place and time. Catford has a rich criminal history and for two of the characters particularly, it never goes away.
The snakes and ladders of society interest me too and is something of a theme. What if you went ‘down the snake’ but astonishingly found that you ended up somewhere better? On the flipside, what sort of person do you become if you have to climb all over people to reach the top of the ladder?
But most importantly, do you want to turn the next page? I hope so.