I had always been an avid reader, from Biggles as a very young boy, through Rafael Sabatini and Dornford Yates when an early teenager, and moving on through the classics under my (real) brother’s influence as I grew a little older. I read across a whole range of genres, from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings in 1964 through D H Lawrence, James, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Steinbeck, Updike, etc., as well as a number of technical books on mathematics, sub-atomic particles and string theory. During the 1980’s and 1990’s, I was most impressed by Anthony Powell’s masterly dodecology, A Dance to the Music of Time, to the extent of even writing a starting chapter in the same vein. I was sufficiently satisfied with this effort to feel convinced that I would be able to write but my busy, traveling working life precluded me from pursuing this any further at the time.

When I retired in 2008, I had considerably more time on my hands and I spent a couple of years writing several hundred pages of a stylized autobiography, or a memoir really. I showed it to my wife and my brother but, while their response showed great loyalty, I had to face reality that it was also only lukewarm. I then pondered the situation for several months, I guess waiting for inspiration.

Eventually, during our final visit to our house in the south of France (our half of which I sold to my brother in 2009), I did, in fact, happen upon two blue entry tickets to the city of Dubrovnik, under the bedside lamp in our bedroom, as shown in the photograph on the cover of the book. This chance discovery forged a link with our visit to Eastern Europe and Dubrovnik in 2005. The third and final piece of the jig-saw was reading the excellent book on the history of Dubrovnik by Robin Harris, which I acknowledged in the book. I now felt that the basic components for the book were all to hand and that I simply had to flesh out the characters, the plot and the narrative. Simple really.

It took a while to get started but, once I had decided to write in the first person, it all seemed to flow. Writing in the first person is restrictive in that it reduces one’s capacity to develop multiple characters but it enabled me to “feel” as Andrew Johnston, and so to become immersed in his character. Perhaps it was merely because it was my first attempt at writing a book of this sort but I found that being in the first person was a critical part of the structure of the book – and so it evolved and developed and crystallised and became what it is now.