ROBERT GODDARD on his latest novel This is the Day They Dream Of

The Algerian Connection

I felt at the conclusion of my earlier novel This is the Night They Come for You that there were undoubtedly more stories to be told about the leading characters - Mouloud Taleb (close to retirement but still not actually retired police superintendent) and Souad Hidouchi (determined, take no nonsense secret service agent) - not to mention the troubled and serpentine recent history of their Algerian homeland. Gratifyingly, many readers agreed with me and so they (and the history) are returning in my new novel, This is the Day They Dream Of. 

It’s giving nothing away to say that in Algeria dreams have often turned into nightmares. The country’s birth as an independent nation in 1962 followed the prolonged trauma of an eight-year war with France, the colonial overlord. But the trauma didn’t end there, with worse to follow during the 1990s - la de´cennie noire: the Black Decade of internecine strife that claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Taleb and Hidouchi are still struggling to bring to justice some of those who did so much then to maim their country - and in some cases have gone on doing so ever since. They know they cannot hope to win the undeclared war they are waging. Le pouvoir, the secret power structure believed by many Algerians to dictate the course of political events in their country, can never truly be overcome. But some battles in that war can be won. And the pair have achievements to be proud of, even if they cannot be openly proclaimed. 

This second novel about them opens with Taleb making the kind of mistake he has always tried to avoid, not least because he has seen all too often how such mistakes end for those who make them. As the only senior police officer still serving who was on the force at the time of the outbreak of la de´cennie noire in January 1992, he is required by his long-suffering boss, Director Bouras, to appear on a TV debate to mark its thirtieth anniversary. Memories of the wife and daughter he lost to one of the many massacres committed during the conflict by Islamist terrorists - or at any rate blamed on them - are stirred. And then a challenge by a campaigning journalist to reveal what he knows about the investigation, of which he was part, into the assassination later in 1992 of President Boudiaf, lure Taleb into a profoundly unwise on-air disclosure. 

He regrets this almost as soon as it has happened, but even in his most lurid imaginings he cannot conceive of the consequences that are set to rain down on him and others in the days that lie ahead. Responsibility for the Boudiaf assassination remains to this day a hotly contested topic in Algeria. The murky and irreconcilable circumstances of Boudiaf’s killing during a televised speech are reminiscent of the welter of mysteries surrounding the Kennedy assassination in the US. And as in that case those who have sought to nail down the truth about what happened have often turned out to be remarkably and fatally accident-prone. 

Taleb managed to dodge that particular bullet in 1992, but three decades on his luck may have run out. There is no shortage of inadequately explained events in the history of independent Algeria and I’ve made use of several of them in constructing a story which I hope accurately reflects the compromises and challenges that cannot be escaped by any servant of the republic, especially those, like Taleb and Hidouchi, who are saddled with principles they cannot seem to help observing. Director Bouras is likewise afflicted by his conscience, though he would strenuously deny it, particularly to his wife, and in this book he has to make some fateful choices about how far to support Taleb. 

The granting and owing of favours is one of the lubricants of Algerian society, which in some measure circumvents the rules of behaviour decreed by le pouvoir. On such favours much may turn, for nothing is clean in the world these three move in, nothing is simple. In the end Taleb, Hidouchi and Bouras will all have to rely on other people’s actions and judgement as well as their own. The outcome is likely to be a desperately close call. And which way it will go... who can say? 

As the cynically humorous Akram, long-serving overseer of the parking garage where Taleb stores his car - a precaution which is itself a hangover from la de´cennie noire, when no police officer would have parked his car on the street for fear of a bomb being planted in it - remarks to him near the end of the book, ‘Surely you know that in this country there’s nothing more dangerous than being honest.’ 

THIS IS THE DAY THEY DREAM OF

Robert Goddard

Published in hardback by Bantam on 6th June 2025 at £20

‘Robert Goddard writes amazing novels of mystery/suspense. His new one is magical and the title is simply the best.’ Stephen King

Robert Goddard’s ‘truly engaging odd couple’ (Sunday Times), Mouloud Taleb and Souad Hidouchi are back!

 Television rights have been sold to Little Island, makers of Patrick Melrose, Get Milly Black and The Wheel of Time.

In 2019 he was awarded the Crime Writers Association Diamond Dagger, the highest honour in British crime writing.

Photo © Graham Jepson 

SHOTS wishes to thank Patsy IrwinPpublicity Director of Transworld for organising this feature  © Robert Goddard