Many years ago, when I was working for a former Director General of Defence Intelligence, I started writing a spy story, The Griffin Interrogator. I finished it in South America but couldn’t find a publisher.
Thirty years and a lifetime of experience later I returned to that first manuscript and recoiled in horror at the shallow characters, casual sexism and improbable plot twists. I threw most of it away and started again. The result was the first draft of Awakening of Spies. My former Penguin colleague Mike Bryan cast a critical eye over it and suggested it needed rigorous editing. I was fortunate to be recommended to Bill Massey, who provided a very full and potentially dispiriting editorial review. For a second time chunks of manuscript were discarded, plot lines simplified and characters fleshed out or dumped altogether.
Then bookseller extraordinaire Peter Snell introduced me to Clare Christian at RedDoor. The team at RedDoor, Clare, Anna Burtt, Heather Boisseau and Lizzie Lewis have been fantastic. I owe them an enormous debt of gratitude.
My other even larger debt is due to my wife Liz. When Liz and I met at university and decided to get married her father had other ideas. We went our separate ways. It was only our meeting again, decades later, that prompted me to look out that very first manuscript. It is above all thanks to Liz’s encouragement, guidance and unfailing optimism that Thomas and Julia Dylan have survived onto the printed page.