Storytelling has always resonated with me. Some of my earliest memories are of making up stories with my action figures while listening to John Williams’ soundtracks on vinyl. I guess not much has changed!

Throughout my childhood, I could often be found sword fighting along the battlements of a Welsh castle. And then as I got older, I progressed on to writing Back to the Future fan fiction.

The joy of imagining characters going on adventures has never left me.

I’ve always loved films that involve characters having adventures in exotic locations. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gladiator and Casablanca are in my top ten favourites.

I adore not just the Star Wars films, but the whole wider universe of books, games and comics, and how the history of the characters and events are all interconnected. I’d love for all of my novels to have characters that are connected to each other in lots of different ways.

I’m a sucker for Hemingway’s writing and his characters. Who wouldn’t want to not hang out with Thomas Hudson in Bimini or fight alongside Robert Jodan in Spain? I also love the world’s and shady characters of Cormac McCarthy, James M.Cain, Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Chandler.

Marie Cadieux and the Fever Coast started life while on a writing course led by John Yorke, author of Into the Woods: How stories work and why we tell them. This book started a geek level interest in story structure and character development. It was on this course that I wrote my first scene that evolved into my first novel. In it, a nurse performed a gruesome operation in a remote jungle hospital.

Too many adventure thriller’s all at once! I’m working on an adaptation of a true life story that took place close to where I grew up, set at the end of the English Civil War. But the novel that I hope to release next is the first of a globe-trotting adventure series featuring characters that have lived in my mind now for far too long.

I’d love to write more stories featuring Marie. But you’ll have to read The Fever Coast to see if she can survive the Panama jungle.

In the Fever Coast, I had alluded to Charlie Blaine initially recruiting and training Marie in the USA. I explored the idea of writing this as a short story, but the more research I did about NYC in 1886, about anarchism and suffrage at the time, and the inauguration of the Statue of Liberty, I knew it had to become a novel.