Leaving her cheating husband and hollow marriage behind, Polly goes to Paris to visit a city she’s always wanted to see and open the next chapter in her life. The City Of Love is everything she wanted it to be and even more - the grandeur of the architecture, the Seine, the people, the atmosphere. This could be the start of something special, something new.
But why did she keep running into the strange man she met on the plane, the one she christened Mr Creepy because his smile made her skin crawl? Perhaps it was just her imagination, perhaps it was paranoia but still…
Quickly making new friends - an American called Katrina and a waiter called Francois - she hoped to start again in a city that didn’t know her and never mind their melodramatic stories of a ‘necktie murderer’ stalking the backstreets of Paris.
What could possibly go wrong?
This all began with a Facebook message, in August 2015, from Neil Buchanan at Stormblade Productions asking if I’d like to write something for him. Since I’d never had an audio book of my work done before, I readily agreed and the first idea came to me in late August, as I was driving and the INXS song New Sensation came on the stereo. I’d already decided I was going to have a female protagonist (Carrie Buchanan narrates the Stormblade audio and it made sense to utilise a terrific female voice actor as much as possible) and my mind made the link that a new sensation could be a bloke or a destination.
I originally thought it’d be horror (since that’s my default genre) but the tone shifted as I worked on the notes (and my novella Drive, a dark thriller, began attracting attention). I had most of the story in my head to pitch it to Neil and Carrie at FantasyCon that October and, buoyed by the fact they liked it, began writing in November.
I had trouble with the original ending (which was a lot darker than it is now) and talked it through with my friend Sue Moorcroft at one of our regular Trading Post meet-ups but otherwise it flowed well, with the first draft written in little over a month. After taking a fortnight off, I wrote the second draft, sent it to my pre-readers (Kim Talbot Hoelzli, David Roberts and Sue) and using their notes, wrote the third draft in January 2016.
The bulk of the story takes place in the Latin Quarter of Paris, somewhere I’d wanted to visit since my teens (like Polly). I was lucky enough to travel there several times on business, where the local manager of our company delighted in showing me around his wonderful city, pointing out places of interest and feeding us in fine restaurants. In May 2012, I was in Paris with my colleague Rosie for a business meeting we managed to wrap up by lunchtime. After a meal, we took the Metro to Notre Dame, had a drink at the Hotel Notre Dame St Michel and as it was a gloriously sunny May afternoon, we walked alongside the river to the Louvre, taking in the Bouquinistes and the Love-Locks on the Pont Des Artes bridge. Polly does exactly the same walk.
Finally, I was able to work my love for The 400 Blows into the story. Polly stays in L’Hotel Truffaut (named for Francois, the director) and all the names come from either the actors or the characters in the film. The one exception is the disco where Polly meets Manu – another favourite film of mine is Pauline a la Plage, directed by Eric Rohmer, so he lent his name to Club Eric.
In real life, Paris was everything I wanted it to be and more - as beautiful and grimy as London can be, with fantastic architecture and a wonderful atmosphere - and I had a lot of fun revisiting it with Polly.
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