A SILENT DEATH
by The Times no 1 bestseller
PETER MAY
Published by riverrun in hardback on 9th January 2020 at £20.00
The award winning no 1 bestselling
Scottish crime writer, Peter May, author of the bestselling Lewis trilogy will
be doing a tour of the UK in January for his new standalone novel ‘A Silent
Death’ which is set between the sinister underworld of the Spanish Costa del
Sol and the UK. It is being published as a lead title for Quercus on 9th
January.
Peter was an award-winning journalist
at the age of just twenty-one, winning ‘Young Journalist of the Year’. He left newspapers for television and
screenwriting, creating three prime-time British drama series and accruing more
than 1,000 television credits. His first novel in The Lewis Trilogy set in The
Hebrides was The Blackhouse. It was a Richard & Judy Book
Club pick. He is published in 32 languages and has sold several million copies
worldwide as well as winning numerous awards. His novel I’ll Keep You Safe (2018) was no.1 in The Times book charts and his last novel The Man With No Face was no 2 in The Sunday Times bestseller charts. In
recent years Peter has won the Best Crime Novel Award for The Blackhouse
at Bouchercon in the US, Entry Island won the Theakston Crime Book
of the Year and Specsavers ITV3 Crime Thriller Book Club Best Read Award.
The research behind A Silent Death
(in Peter’s own words)
THE SETTING
The book takes place in the south of
Spain in an area I know well. About
eight years ago I bought an apartment overlooking the Mediterranean a little to
the west of the Spanish resort town of Estepona. Since then I have spent most of my winters
there to escape the cold of my home. In
a little study looking out over a sparkling sunlit sea I have written my last
six books.
It is a part of Spain with which I
have become very familiar and have wanted to write about for some time. But not the Spain of sun, sea and sand that
characterises the British holidaymaker’s image of the Costa del Sol. I wanted to get under the skin of this
superficially beautiful part of the world, lifting stones to reveal the flip side
of the seaside paradise depicted in travel agents’ brochures. To write about the “Costa del Crime”, that
monicker so beloved of the tabloid headline writers. The reality that lurks just a few streets
away from the seafront facades of bars and restaurants that look out on crowded
beaches. A much darker world of
drug-running and people trafficking. Of gangs and violence and the seeds of social
unrest sown by a turbulent history of Moorish occupation and Catholic
resistance.
Much of this other side of southern
Spain was revealed to me during an interview with the chief of police in a hill
town which is the administrative centre for a length of coastline that
stretches east and west along the south coast, and north towards its
mountainous interior. He happily introduced
me to his handgun and holster, before taking me on a detailed tour of the
police station. There were interview
rooms and detectives’ offices, a gun room, and an
evidence room where he laid out a huge array of lethal weapons seized during
recent raids on local drugs gangs. Parts
of the town, it seemed, were virtually no-go areas for the police. Derelict buildings - in fact, housing
developments unfinished since the financial collapse of 2007/8 - had been taken
over to become the headquarters of such gangs.
But these gangs are not just operating
at street level. They are trafficking industrial quantities of drugs - heroin and
cocaine. The police have trouble
arresting gang members for more than minor possession. The big drugs hauls are sent out into the
hills, to be stored in the barns and outhouses of peasant farmers who are
coerced into cooperation. While I was
researching the book, a whole family of innocent farmers was slaughtered by
gang members when they went to retrieve drugs from the wrong farm by mistake.
People trafficking, too, is a booming industry - less lucrative
perhaps than drugs, but also less risky, with smaller sentences for those who
are caught. Increasingly boats are arriving along the south coast of Spain from
North Africa - a relatively short crossing.
There are many reports of sunbathing holidaymakers startled to see
ragged lines of illegal immigrants piling off ramshackle boats that have washed up on the
beaches. Clutching their meagre
possessions, they quickly melt away into the hills beyond, where they are met
by the people traffickers who guide them to
temporary accommodation in any one of the hundreds of abandoned developments
that pepper the coastline.
In 2000, developers seemed to believe
that there would be no end to the influx of wealthy Russians and Europeans flocking to the sun to buy apartments.
But with the collapse of financial institutions worldwide towards the end
of the decade, both money and buyers dried up, and hundreds of developments
were simply abandoned. Some had only
just been started, others were near completion.
All are now crumbling in the searing heat of the sun, and nature is
gradually reclaiming what had been taken from it. Cranes hired during the boom stand idly, like
so many lost dinosaurs, looming over these scars on the landscape - the
companies that owned them long since gone bust, just like the companies who
hired them. Such places can be scary and
dangerous.
The influence of a new generation of
monied Russians is plain to see all around.
Many of the billionaire yacht owners who dock their boats in the marina
at the fashionable Puerto Banus are Russian.
There are Russian clubs and restaurants, and more and more apartments
are being snapped up by Russian tourists.
Vladimir Putin himself is rumoured to own a large estate in the hills
behind Marbella, flying in by helicopter from his yacht anchored out in the bay.
DEAF AND BLIND
One of the other main characters in A
Silent Death is deaf and blind.
I first developed a consciousness
about the phenomenon of deaf-blindness after watching a TV ad appealing for
money for a deaf-blind charity. I
wondered what it must feel like to be deaf AND blind. It was unthinkable. To lose both primary senses and become
trapped within yourself, your own body becoming a prison confining you in a
world of darkness and silence. I began research on the subject and discovered
that it was more prevalent than one might expect. There are nearly 400,000 sufferers in the UK alone, with that figure expected to rise to
600,000 in the next fifteen years. One of the most common causes is a genetic
disease known as Usher’s Syndrome in which the victim develops partial or total
hearing loss that worsens over time.
Peter decided to explore this illness through the character of a middle-aged
woman, Ana, delving into her experience through a first person narration. Although not the principal character, she is
central to the story. We discover that
she was afflicted in early childhood
with hearing problems, then diagnosed with Usher’s Syndrome in her teens,
when she developed “night blindness”, which is often a precursor to vision loss
caused by a disease known as retinitis pigmentosa, or RP. We accompany her on her nightmare journey
into complete hearing loss and total blindness, and through her limited senses
learn first hand about the book’s main antagonist when he takes her
hostage.
I learned a lot about the Usher
Syndrome through reading interviews about it, people describing their
experiences from childhood to adulthood, and sometimes old age, which gave me
an extraordinary insight into their world.
A world of bullying and neglect, by peers, and teachers, and society in
general. It made me determined to cast
light on their suffering through Ana.
The only channel of communication for
deaf-blind sufferers with the world
around them has come with the development of technologies that provide braille
screens that allow them to surf the internet and exchange messages with
others. But with so comparatively few sufferers worldwide, investment in finding medical solutions is
small, and the hope of a future cure equally so.
GIBRALTAR
The final part of the book takes place
in Gibraltar, that giant rock which casts its ubiquitous shadow all along the
southern Spanish coast. It is always
there, somehow, in the telling of the story, and seemed like the perfect
setting for the denouement of the book.
Peter made two visits to The
Rock. The first was to gain a general
impression of this outpost of a long-lost British Empire, where almost 96
percent voted to remain in Europe - only to be dragged out against their will. A febrile sense of uncertainty suffused the atmosphere of the place when I was there,
with the prospect of the reintroduction of a hard border with Spain ruining the
lives and careers of many thousands of people living in the territory. He was surprised to discover that while its
residents steadfastly call themselves British, the ethnicity of the population
is hugely diverse, with many deriving from a range of other European and
African countries such as Italy, Portugal, Greece, Malta and Morocco. Only 13 percent come from the UK, with little
more than twice that number possessing British surnames. And yet as you step across the border from
Spain, almost the first thing you see is an old fashioned red British telephone
box.
His second visit took him high up on
the rock to research the detailed specifics of the story’s end.
Photo © 2019 Ali Karim. Lads messing about at the launch party for MAN WITH NO FACE
