Hard Knocks

From the Author’s notebook

This was Charlie Fox’s first brush with the world of close protection, which she would go on to make her own. When I first came up with the idea to send Charlie undercover into a close-protection training school, the book was originally going to be set in a remote part of the English Lake District. Then the school shooting at Dunblane in Scotland in 1996 caused handguns to be widely banned in the UK and I had to look for another location. Most of the actual bodyguard training schools here moved to Europe – mostly France, Holland or Germany. As I knew Germany as a location better than either of the others, the village of Einsbaden and the surrounding area began to form in my head.

I used some old pictures of Wannsee Manor in a suburb of Berlin as my inspiration for Einsbaden Manor. It had the right air of brooding menace about it, and the flat roof of the design also came in very useful during various scenes. The lack of speed limits on the autobahns also became an integral part of the plot, so the story moulded nicely into its location. Being able to set the action in the middle of winter, on a continent as large as Europe gave an added glint of frozen danger.

For the writing of this book it was absolutely necessary to drive at speeds in excess of one-hundred-and-fifty miles an hour on the German roads – erm, purely for research purposes, of course. Just goes to show that this game can be a lot of fun.

One final point. Please note that this story was originally written in 2002 and first published in the UK in 2003, when mobile phones and internet access had not reached the level of sophistication we take for granted today.