It’s easy to be sanguine as I look back at my younger self, but I was demonstrably starting to lose belief in my abilities, doubting my future as a publishable writer. I was also slogging my guts out, working a day job in London and trying to find space to write in what free time remained to me. My first Rebus novel, Knots & Crosses, had been published without fanfare in 1987. On May 12 of that year I record in my trusty diary that ‘I should be doing the satellite novel (Westwind in other words). I’m doing nothing.’ Well, not nothing exactly because at the same time I was also polishing the spy thriller which would appear the following year as Watchman. I was living in Tottenham and working as an assistant at the National Folktale Centre, based at what was then Middlesex Polytechnic. Unusually for London, this meant I could walk to work. It also gave me access to a computer, while at home I still hammered away on a noisy electric typewriter. Not that the computer, with its large floppy disks, was much use to me – I didn’t know anyone else (my publisher included) who used one. My first Amstrad word processor was still a ways off, while the fax machine in my workplace remained as mysterious to me as the Sphinx.

I’m not sure what gave me the idea that a techno-thriller would be my next project.

Knots & Crosses had been a fairly traditional whodunit. Watchman was a spy novel influenced by Graham Greene’s The Human Factor. Westwind, on the other hand, would start with a space shuttle plummeting to earth and a malfunctioning satellite. It seems to me now that I was feeling my way towards what kind of writer I wanted to be. High on the list was: successful enough to give up the day job. I’d tried the crime novel and the spy novel and now I was going to attempt to write the sort of high-tech thriller that sold by the pallet-load in airports and railway stations. So it was that I visited my local library on Tottenham High Road and asked the librarian for anything they could give me to do with space shuttles and how satellites work. Many of the resulting books proved too technical for me – my degree was in English literature rather than mathematics and physics – but a few proved useful. (I’ll admit now that one of them was a children’s book.) Then there was the trusty Rand McNally Road Atlas of the USA, since part of the book was going to be set there (international sales ahoy!) and I’d yet to visit that country outside of novels, movies and TV shows.

As you can see, I was young, hungry, naïve – and driven.