Road Kill

From the Author’s notebook

ROAD KILL came about because of a snippet I spotted in a local Lancaster newspaper. It reported that during the summer months an unusually high number of motorcyclists had been killed on the country road between the motorway turnoff and a popular weekend bikers’ haunt at Devil’s Bridge, near Kirkby Lonsdale.

The police were dismissing the accidents as “rider error”, but it got me thinking, What if it wasn’t accidental? What if it was deliberate . . .?

The story also gave me the opportunity to explore two themes that had been on my mind for some time.

The first of these was that all bikers on page and screen seemed to be portrayed as gun-running, meth lab-running outlaws. Yes, the members of the Devil’s Bridge Club do break the law, but they’re hardly career criminals, and I wonder how much their attitude towards the legal and illegal is coloured by their usual contact with the police – being stopped for speeding.

The second was that Ireland often got the unpleasant end of the stick as far as the media went. I’ve spent quite a bit of time there, both north and south of the border, and loved the place. On the whole, it’s very different from the gloomy, violence-ridden image gleaned from the news reports.

Finally, when I was writing this book, I knew the ending was going to take place on the ferry coming home, but I wasn’t sure exactly how it was all going to happen. Then I had the chance to spend a day crawling all over an Irish Sea ferry, learning the ins and outs of its complex fire-fighting systems. The way it operates is exactly as described in the story – a nice example of how the truth is often so much better than anything you could invent.