Through an odd quirk of fate, Terry Pratchett gave me some research help on this novel – or rather didn’t! You will notice if you read the Acknowledgements that one is to the Central Electricity Generating Board: atomic energy and nuclear power stations are key components of the plot of Atom Bomb Angel and in 1981, as part of my research, I made an appointment to visit the Press Officer of the Central Electricity Generating Board, a Mr Terry Pratchett – then a completely unknown fledgling writer himself. As I sat down and explained my story – and that I wanted to have access to a nuclear power station – he said to me, very pragmatically, ‘Well, I cannot possibly give you any help. Look at it from my perspective: if I help you with this book and then when it’s published it frightens people off nuclear power, then the whole industry could go into decline and I could find myself being made redundant.’ And he was not joking! It was a very short meeting. He gave me a CEGB brochure (which I gather he had written) which argued in favour of nuclear power stations by pointing out that, in Victorian times, an average of one person per week died by drowning in a mill-pond, whereas there had been only one than death caused by the entire British nuclear power programme since the opening of Calder Hall in 1956 – the world’s first nuclear power station!

Atom Bomb Angel is a book that had a profound impact on the way I was to research my novels from then on. I needed some short scenes in Namibia but I was short of money, so instead of going out there I gleaned all my information from books (this was before the Internet) and from talking to someone who had worked there. When Atom Bomb Angel was published, I was asked about my experiences in Namibia in one of my first newspaper interviews. With my face bright red, I fibbed and squirmed my way through the interview, mumbling about it being quite hot and a lot of sand, and surprisingly lush in places.

I vowed then and there that never again would I write about anywhere that I had not visited, nor anything that I had not in some way experienced – death excepted! I think that has helped the authenticity of my writing hugely, although it has also led to many moments of terror – perhaps the worst being when I was incarcerated in a coffin with the lid screwed down, for thirty minutes, during my research for my first Roy Grace novel, Dead Simple. And I am very deeply claustrophobic …