Why did I write 37 Hours? Well first, of course, it’s a sequel. At the end
of 66 Metres Nadia has succeeded, but the Client is still out
there. In fact the first scene in Chapter One of 37 Hours was originally the
epilogue to 66 Metres, but the
editor and I decided to leave Nadia languishing in prison. And so the readers demanded a sequel...
But there were five other reasons.
But there were five other reasons.
- Jack Reacher
- Diving a nuclear sub
- Shark-attacks
- Chernobyl
- London
1. Jack Reacher
The title 37
Hours is a tribute to Lee Child’s book titled 61 Hours. This was the very first Jack Reacher book I read, and got
me hooked and back into thrillers. I love the relentless pace and minimalist
style, and how Jack is uncompromising. Of course Nadia isn’t Jack, but another
character, Vladimir, is close, and the book starts with him in the Prologue.
I’ve already had a number of readers tell me the book starts just like a
Reacher novel. Couldn’t ask for more! Here’s the opening of 37 Hours:
Vladimir
was cuffed and hooded, but his guards had made a fatal mistake. His hands were
behind him, but not attached to the inner structure of the military van, a
standard Russian UAZ 452 – he’d know those rickety creaks and the pungent blend
of oil and diesel anywhere. The vehicle trundled towards some unknown
destination where he would be interrogated, beaten some more, then shot in the back
of the head.
Three of the four men chattered as they picked up speed down
a straighter road. Their second mistake. Clearly they weren’t Special Forces – Spetsnaz – like he’d been until recently.
They were regular army. He’d only seen the two heavies who’d snatched him from
breakfast with his daughter. Now he knew there were four – one other had
engaged in the banter, another had remained silent but was referred to as the
butt of several bawdy jokes. The hierarchy of the men was also clear. The
leader was in the front passenger seat, the silent one the driver, leaving the
two musclemen in the back with him. He waited. They’d been driving for an hour
or so, initially dirt tracks, now a highway, which meant they were on the E119
to Vostok. If they turned right, he had a chance, as they would have to cross
the Volga River. Then he would make his move.
If they turned left, he was a dead man.
Vladimir wasn’t one for options, or for hedging his bets. Not
a question of making the right choice, but of making the choice right. In all
his missions he’d never cared much for a Plan B. Leave too many options open,
and events control you. You invite failure.
The van would
turn right.
2. Diving a submarine
66 Metres
covered a lot of diving aspects, but there were two I hadn’t touched. The first
is diving a submarine. The first time I did this was the M2, a submarine wreck
off the Dorset coast near Weymouth. There is something stunning about coming
across a submarine underwater, like a giant metallic whale. I tried to capture
the way I felt in chapter three, when Nadia comes across a hijacked Russian nuclear submarine:
They hit thirty-five metres and levelled off. Still she saw
nothing, but the sleds both slowed, and then she saw why. The forward light
picked up the huge black tail-fin of the Borei Class nuclear sub, like the fin
of a shark, which happened to be the nickname for this class of sub. Sergei’s
sled circled behind, his forward beam illuminating the massive propeller. She tried
to gauge how long each blade was. Maybe three metres.
Sergei took point again, and fired a flare that fizzed
forward like a lazy yellow firework. The sub was one hundred and seventy metres
long, only slightly shorter than its predecessor, the Typhoon. But seeing it, positioned
at one end while the flare swept forward over its dark beauty, was something
else. The flare continued its arc over the conning tower, all the way to the
prow, her destination. The light faded and plunged them back into darkness save
for the sled’s lights. But the after-image was etched onto her retinas. Russian
subs didn’t really go in for names, they were usually referred to as Projects and given a number, but Sergei
had told her this one was the Yuri
Gagarin. He’d have been proud.
3. Shark attacks
There were no sharks in 66 Metres, so I wanted to include them in the sequel. In the second
part of the book, Nadia and Jake dive in the South China Sea off the coast of
Borneo, on a remote island called Anspida, which is an anagram of one of my top
3 diving destinations in the world, and a place where you can encounter large
man-eaters, as well as hammerheads. Some of the dive instructors there used to
play a game (the diving equivalent of Russian Roulette), where you
swim away from the reef, out into the blue, and wait for the sharks to find
you. Here’s where Nadia gives it a try…
She
glanced back several times, the reef just in sight, somewhere between fifteen
and twenty metres away. Jake kept them at the same distance, two divers in
perfect orbit around the island, two thousand feet of ocean beneath them. She
stared straight ahead, into the blue. The sun’s rays lasered through the water,
playing tricks on her brain. Several times she thought she saw something, and
her heart skipped a beat, but it was nothing.
And then it came for real. A shadow at first, morphing into
a blue nose, the curved line of its mouth, its eyes, and its pectoral fins,
outlining an ellipse just like in Jake’s drawing. If it opened its mouth she
would fit inside. Fifteen metres away, closing. Not on a swing-by. Coming
straight at her. Ten metres. It was massive, she could now see the dorsal fin
and her brain extrapolated the rest; it was easily five metres long. Its
pectoral fins dropped, its mouth opened a little, revealing racks of
backward-sloping teeth...
The actual shark
attack scene which comes a little later, was hard to write. Mostly sharks leave
people alone. But if you’re bleeding in waters like these, you’re in serious
trouble. As a diver, even now when I read the scene in 37 Hours where two lives are claimed in
a feeding frenzy, my blood still runs cold.
4. Chernobyl
I used to work in the nuclear industry,
trying to make it safer. Chernobyl was such a shock to the world at the time,
but I was also impressed by the heroism of the soldiers and others who worked
manically to contain the radiation leak after the initial explosion, many of
whom died shortly after from radiation poisoning, or later from cancers. There
was also the lesser known story of heroism concerning shutting off an
underwater valve to prevent a secondary explosion which would have re-opened
the wound and irradiated half of Europe. This story was part-truth, part myth,
and I included it as a story-within-a-story. It was the motivation behind the
original title of the book, which was to be ‘One-Way Dive.’ And so the third
part of the book takes place in Chernobyl, in Reactor 4. I was really pleased
when the publisher decided to put Chernobyl on the cover.
5. London
I live in Paris, which is a great city, but
I still miss London where I used to live. When writing a thriller, you have to
put what the hero/heroine values most on the line. Nadia is Russian. London
isn’t her city. But, to an extent, it’s mine, and I care about it. London is
where 66 Metres started, and it’s where 37 Hours ends. In the final chapter,
when the 37 Hours has almost run out, there’s a short scene where London is
almost a character, one that Nadia wants desperately to see one last time. I
think that scene, only a couple of paragraphs, is one of the most
powerful I’ve ever written, and as an ex-Londoner it chokes me up every time I
read it.
That’s it. I wrote 37 Hours in six months. For
me that’s very fast (I have a day job!). It poured out of me, demanding to be
written. If you do read it, I really hope you get some of the same satisfaction
I got out of writing it!
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