Lockdown

Foreword

In 2005 when I was finding it impossible to secure a publisher for either The Blackhouse or my first Enzo book, Extraordinary People, I started researching a crime novel set against the backdrop of a bird flu pandemic.

Bird flu, or H5N1, was being predicted by scientists at the time as the likely next flu pandemic. In 1918, the Spanish Flu had killed anywhere between twenty and fifty million people worldwide, and bird flu — with a mortality rate of sixty per cent or higher — was being forecast to exceed that by a wide margin.

Having done a considerable amount of research into the Spanish Flu for Snakehead, one of my China Thrillers, it was a topic in which I was already well versed. But none of that prepared me for what my research on H5N1 would turn up, and the horrors that a bird flu pandemic could unleash on the world.

I began looking into the chaos it would inflict, and how society as we know it could rapidly start to disintegrate. I chose London as my setting, the epicentre of the pandemic, and a city in total lockdown. Against this background, the rendered bones of a murdered child are uncovered on a building site where workmen are feverishly constructing an emergency hospital. My detective, Jack MacNeil, is told to investigate, even as his own family is touched by the virus.

During a six-week spell of burning the midnight oil I wrote Lockdown. It was never published. British editors at the time thought my portrayal of London under siege by the invisible enemy of H5N1 was unrealistic and could never happen — in spite of the fact that all my research showed that, really, it could. Then an American publisher bought the Enzo series, and my China Thrillers were published for the first time in the States. My focus shifted to the other side of the Atlantic, and Lockdown was consigned to a folder in my Dropbox, where it has remained. Until now.

As I write this, I am hunkered down at home in France, forbidden to leave my house except in exceptional circumstances. A new coronavirus, Covid-19, is ravaging the world, and society as we know it is rapidly disintegrating. Even with its mortality rate being just a fraction of bird flu, politicians are having to fight to control the chaos and panic that Covid-19 is spreading worldwide. The parallels with Lockdown are terrifying. So this seemed like the moment to open up that dusty Dropbox folder and dig out that old manuscript to share with my readers — if only to make us all realise just how much worse things could actually be.

Peter May

France 2020