The First Horseman
What can you tell our readers about your new book The First Horseman?
I set out to write another financial thriller but my publisher considered the result a straight Crime Thriller. However Amazon considers it a medical thriller and my readers agree.
I’m fine with that, because it is about the kinds of things the latest research into aging is looking at and it is about genetic engineering and biotech. It is also about disease and plague. So I suppose Amazon knows best. It hit No 2 in their Medical fiction chart this Christmas.
According to statistics our life expectancy is growing by 3-4 months every year, so the prospect of living for hundreds of years suddenly doesn’t seem like science fiction. However Amazon also thinks the book is Sci-Fi.
So suddenly I’m a writer of Sci-Fi, medical, crime thrillers. I’ll OK with that too.
The premise is we are just a stones throw away from rolling back the clock of human aging. Imagine what some people would be prepared to pay to be the first in the queue for that medicine. Imagine the lengths they would go to if it cost millions per treatment. Imagine a world where one day a dose might be $1 and everyone lived to be 500 years old. It might be a world with 100 billion people and an environment barely worth living in.
This is where a The First Horse Man comes in to play. The First Horseman is plague and something that can be engineered.
You are the CEO of ADVFN, so when did your writing come into play?
I’ve been writing since I was very young, so young in fact I wrote my first stories on a typewriter. One of my early manuscripts ended up in the hands of No Exit Press. They said “write a financial thriller.”
So I went ahead and wrote “The Armageddon Trade” that came out just as the credit crunch hit. The book got a great launch and was a best seller of sorts.
You have written for many publications such as Wired magazine, so how does this writing process compare to novels for you?
It is quite different. For one thing a 500 word or even a thousand word piece can be written in a single blast. If it’s a subject you know and you are used to writing, you can just download a piece from your brain about as fast as you can type. Ask me to write 1000 words on investing in the UK stock market and it is yours in 45 minutes.
A book is a much bigger lump of text and it doesn’t necessarily come pre-baked in one’s mind.
So there is a lot of imagining that needs to go into a book. This has to be done in advance. Before you can describe the story you have to imagine it. Then when the story is outlined in your mind or better still on paper, you can blast it out.
However the construction phase can take a long time.
Happily some of my books are just perfectly formed at conception. Some ideas kind of describe themselves. Let me give you an example. Rats in London get Rabies. How hard is that one going to be to write?
In fact I’m going to start writing that now!
This is your fourth novel, so tell us about your previous three.
The first book was The Armageddon Trade. It is about a young kid who is a gopher in a big investment bank that turns out to be a trading prodigy. He is the Mozart of the stock market. He can do no wrong. His ability to predict the market means he can see a future when the markets just stop dead. This can only happen if the world stops too. However he can use this same skill to track down the people whose plan may lead to this market predicted Armageddon.
The second book is The Twain Maxim. Mark Twain said “a mine was a hole in the ground with a fool at the bottom and a crook at the top.”
It’s a story of a mine in Congo and the crimes that take place to create it and to control it. It’s set in the world’s most terrifying place, the border between Congo and Rwanda, the Kivu province. A place that actually does live under a volcano: the active Nyiragongo.
Book 3 is Kusanagi. The story centres around the Japanese crown jewels, which the Emperor must be crowned with to be legitimate. Sadly they were lost in the 14th Century. This is a bit inconvenient as this fact has never been admitted to the public but it is generally understood to be true.
This kind of polite lunacy is very Japanese.
The trouble starts when the crown jewels are recovered from a wreck.
Kusanagi, the sword of the crown jewels is a sword of legend. The katana of the gods. Once discovered it becomes a priceless artefact that makes the value of the Mona Lisa seem puny. Many will stop at nothing to own it.
How much research was required for this novel?
I’m always doing lots of research because that is a lot of what I do. I’m what they call in the US, a knowledge worker. My job as CEO at ADVFN, which is a huge financial website, means I’m basically swimming in a sea of information all the time which my brain for some reason sucks up like a sponge. Now and again the information gels in my mind and out pops a book.
Who do you most like to read?
I love reading non-fiction and in particular books of fact. Of all things I’d prefer to read a text book. It might sound dull, but I like to know how things work or fit together. I really enjoy those “gotcha” moment when you understand something new.
These days I’m too busy writing to read much, though I did read Tolkien’s Smith of Wotton Major over Christmas which was very charming and the Sherlock Holmes’, a Study in Scarlett. These days I’m using the Kindle a lot, which is interesting because it certainly makes you tell the difference between a good book and a bad one very quickly.
Which authors do you feel have affected your work?
It will be those early books I must have read as a little boy, perhaps nine years old, that will have affected me the most. I can still remember snippets even now of reading stories that must have been burnt into my young mind. They would have mostly been fantasy adventure and broadly Sci-Fi and ghost stories.
I think I’m probably trying to recreate the vividness of the experience those nameless books would have given me. I recall there was one in which a family was trapped in a raft on an underground river travelling down an endless tunnel. It would be that kind of thing which would have left the biggest mark.
What is your favourite novel?
I have to confess, on careful reflection I probably enjoyed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire the most of any book in the last 20 years. The Potter books up to that point were such a gentle read that I found them almost therapeutic. I’ve enough nail biting thrillers in my head; I don’t really want to read someone else’s.
What advice could you give to someone wanting to write a novel about a similar subject matter?
Write the story in 100 sentences. Then turn each sentence into 1000 words. If you do it this way you will save yourself a lot of time and heartache.
What is next for you?
The next book is called Ponzi; it involves the same characters from the first four books and is about a Ponzi scheme, the on-going Mexican Narco-War and the advent of the first Trillionaire.
Female First Lucy Walton