Introduction

The Missing Boy, my new novel, was a very painful book to write. It’s the story of a thirteen year old boy who runs away from home. Starting with the horrible fact that 100,000 children are reported missing each year, I found myself more and interested in how and why this happens. I talked to the police, watched missing person programmes (extraordinarily dramatic) and researched the families left behind. Happily, most of these children return but some don’t and many have met various levels of abuse and violence while they are unprotected in the world. Drugs are a continuing danger.

There were times when I regretted choosing the suffering of a child as a central theme. The structure of the book as a kind of thriller with the boy’s safety under constant threat meant that I wrote it in a state of deep anxiety. In some ways I felt more like a voyeur than the author.

On the other hand it was a new way for me to look at the importance of a loving family and the miseries cause by its breakdown. Love is much written about in our society but I found myself questioning whether it is often another word for selfishness.

The Missing Boy follows my last novel, Lies and Loyalties which, although about very different circumstances, has linked themes.

Lies and Loyalties (paperback 2008) is about a family of four brothers and one sister, an MP, a QC, a Catholic priest, a brother who suffers from mental problems and his wife who at the beginning of the novel is resident in Her Majesty’s Prison Holloway. I’ve always been interested in the gap between the haves and have nots, between the comfortable and the disturbed. I may have caught that interest from my father, Lord Longford (see Longford Trust) who spent most of his later life trying to help prisoners. Now I’m involved with my work for Inside Time, the national newspaper for prisoners.

Lies, loyalties and love probably are the themes of most of my novels – obsessional love, serious lies and (mostly) family loyalties. To which I guess I’d have to add violence. Not that I’ve ever written the same novel twice. My last dozen novels have included: the story of a random act of violence in which the attacker leaves prison and searches for his victim, Bodily Harm; a passionate love affair partly set in Chile, One Summer; a sequel to Jane Austen’s, Emma, called Perfect Happiness (Emma & Knightley in US) which is the not very convincing last line of Austen’s superb novel. Then there’s The Space Between which examines the prospects of a young widow (lies) and A Woman’s Life which is a study of friendship (loyalties) between three women over forty years. They come from America, Ireland and England but their lives interweave over forty years.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a saga novel called A Woman’s Age which followed the lives of three generations of Englishwomen, kicking off in 1910. I suppose that was the nearest I’ve got to writing a book about feminism but women have often been at the centre of my work. Occasion of Sin, a tragic love story was actually an up to date telling of Tolstoy’s great novel Anna Karenina. In my version Anna gets back on the train. I shan’t go through all my novels here but there are a couple more I’d like to mention. The Garish Day has a man, a diplomat, at its centre and deals with four decades and as many countries. Magic and Fate is my stab at magic realism, although in fact a lot of it, particularly the super model heroine took a great deal of research. Luckily, the doyenne of the catwalks, Suzy Menkes, (fashion editor of the Herald Tribune) took me under her wing.

Writing about Magic and Fate reminds me to put in a note about the importance of entertainment- even fun – in novels, even those with serious themes. I often think that the reason that childrens’ books have become so popular with adults that the authors know very well that no child will stick with a book that doesn’t entertain them.

I began writing childrens’ books to entertain my own children – they did the first illustrations as I read them aloud (a practise I highly recommend) and now I’m looking to my grandchildren. My latest novels for the 8-11 age group are both adventure stories with a touch of fantasy, Far-Out and There’s More to Life.