Excerpt

I was born and raised in the seaside town of Blackpool in Lancashire. I live now in the far North of Scotland. Between times, I lived in Devon and Dumfries and Galloway. The back-drops to my novels, which I always think of as characters in their own right, are drawn from these experiences. Waves Break on Unknown Shores and its sequel, Shifting Sands (awaiting publication) are set in a fictional seaside town which has many of the features of a holiday destination like Blackpool. It is a much smaller place, and has a river passing though it at the southern end, separating the bustle of the town from the quieter, residential areas. In this respect, Sefton, despite its northern ‘feel’ shares features with small, Devon seaside towns where I spent many holidays.

Sefton has many problems. The superficial jollity and happiness of a holiday community overlies over a darker underbelly of deprivation and criminality. It is a town full of gaiety, but also a place where crime flourishes. Between these polarities, local people try to get on with their normal, everyday lives.

It is a place where the local newspaper, like Blackpool’s Evening Gazette, is compulsory reading for many of its residents, a place where the football team still draws thousands of supporters, a place where a magnificent promenade and seafront stands in stark contrast to what lies just behind it. In places like Sefton, you keep your back to the town and concentrate of the sea and the sand.

I decided it would be appropriate for Phil Tyler to work for a local newspaper in Sefton because, for Phil, Sefton is home. It repels him and, at the same time, attracts him. He hates so much about it, but feels comfortable and at ease with the decent, everyday folk who live there. It carries desperate memories but gives him that feeling of warmth which only familiarity can provide. It also, I think, lies behind his self-deprecating, snarky humour, and his way of dealing with the darker side of life.

I set other novels, like The Hand of Ronan Hawke, in a fictional area of the NW Highlands of Scotland. There is something intractable about the mountains and the sea which makes them both comforting and appalling, reassuring and coldly indifferent. They are places where characters can feel at one with the universe, and yet horribly alone. It is a place where human relationships matter because, in the end, we only have each other.