Killer Instinct

Afterword

This Afterword was originally written for the Busted Flush Press US trade paperback edition of KILLER INSTINCT, published in 2010. Publisher David Thompson planned similar editions of RIOT ACT, HARD KNOCKS and ROAD KILL, but he tragically died, suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of thirty-eight, shortly before the second book was due to go to print. This was a huge loss to everyone who knew him – one from which we are all still reeling.

When David asked me to write an afterword for the new edition of KILLER INSTINCT, it made me think afresh about this, the very first Charlie Fox book, and why I chose to join her story at this point.

This is not, after all, the beginning of Charlie’s journey, but I look back on it as the major turning point in her life. The events covered during the course of the book change her forever from having been a victim, to not only fighting back on her own behalf, but as a protector for others. It sets her out, whether she is aware of it at the time, on the path she will subsequently follow into the world of close protection.

Ironically enough, it was Charlie’s first official job as a bodyguard, in the events of book four in the series, FIRST DROP, that brought her to US shores for the first time in more ways than one. Setting FIRST DROP in Daytona Beach, Florida over the Spring Break weekend caught the eye of a New York editor, who decided that’s where the story should start for American readers, and the title mistakenly gave the impression there was no history to Charlie before then.

But there is, and KILLER INSTINCT is the first instalment.

I wrote this story at a time when I had just been the target of a number of death-threat letters through my work, and I probably identified with Charlie more closely during the course of this book than any other. Of course, those letters never escalated to anything like the level of threat that my protagonist faces here, but they planted the germ of the idea. And it did inspire me to go out and learn a lot of self-defence techniques, which have stood me in very good stead ever since.

I chose the northern English city of Lancaster for the setting because it was not only an area I knew well, but because I was intrigued by the dual-edged personality of the place. By day it’s an attractive university town, filled with history and the kind of elegant Georgian architecture that has seen it called the Bath of the North.

But by night the number of pubs and clubs give the city an altogether darker feel. At one point it had one of the highest violent-crime rates per head of population in the country. And although one or two people asked if the events described in the book could really happen in a place like Lancaster, my answer is . . . they did, more or less.

In one of those weird twists of fate, shortly after KILLER INSTINCT was published, one of the local nightclubs was shut down after a drug-dealing scandal, in which the owner and half the door staff were allegedly involved. (And if you’re cheating, and reading this afterword before you’ve read the book itself, you better just forget that bit!)

So, how does it feel to finally have the beginning of Charlie’s story out there again? Bloody marvellous, if you must know . . .