Don’t you
just love weekends? Time to slow the pace a little, relax in the bath with an
ebook? Caroline and I often end up having a row on Friday night, the
accumulated tension of the working week boiling up into a tornado of
misunderstanding. But by Saturday morning, everything’s fine again. We both
have a large capacity for forgiveness, which is just as well after the scrapes
Caroline got into when setting up a new office for her company in Germany.
It is a timely story, an insight
into a behind the scenes world of politics and finance. I just had to collect
the evidence and write it down. A small indiscretion with work colleagues in Spain
had brought my wife to the attention of Melody Bigger, former chief executive
of a medical instruments company and part-time Madame. Melody had an old score
to settle with a banker, Von Wolfswinkle. She tricked Caroline into attending
Wolfswinkle’s weekend sex parties, a private relaxation for hard working
financiers and politicians.
It was quite an education for
Caroline, but understandably she was reluctant to give me the details of
her initiation into the Inner Circle.
In the end I had to rescue her from a sex club in Copenhagen. I’m a lawyer, and
it was satisfying to do some investigative work to uncover the honey trap plot. That
Melody Bigger is, as the Americans say, ‘a piece of work’.
People ask, ‘How did you come up with
the story?’ The plot was taken from life, and marriage gave me the character of
Caroline. The book gives some insight of the pressures many face in trying
to balance the competing demands of work and marriage. But if you can laugh
while chaos threatens to derail your life, then you’ll probably enjoy Shameless Ambition.
I don’t like the
idea of being pigeon-holed into a genre or sub-genre. How many times do you
read a ‘blurb’ after finishing a book and think, ‘no, that’s not the book I
read?’ Perhaps I also wonder about the
word ‘romantic’ in relation to the gritty world we experience and to which I try
to be true. But romance is story, and it is all for love, even though
sometimes we misread the signals. A genre label is a helpful signpost, giving
the potential reader a shortcut or a health warning – ‘may contain sexy scenes.’
In the end, all that matters is good
writing. Good writing makes good reading. There is something real, an
underlying truth, in well written fantasy, however outrageous it may seem; and
there’s nearly always something wonderful and fantastic in the real things that happen in our
lives. That’s why we all have stories to tell, and why I spend my weekends writing.
.jpg)
