Notes and Acknowledgements

Here are Ian’s NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS which appear in DON’T TALK as background to the book…

I didn’t think I would write another novel after my debut OUTER CIRCLE appeared in January 2018. In fact, bereft, I didn’t think I would write anything again after my wife Vikki Orvice died in February 2019, aged just 56.

It was Vikki, an English Literature graduate and avid reader, who had encouraged me to fulfil my ambition to write fiction after a career of writing sports books and being a football correspondent for national newspapers. She was my muse, in so many ways indeed, with the character Jan Mason based on her, V having herself been a news reporter before becoming a sports writer. 

A few months after Vikki died, I saw something on Twitter about the celebrated crime and thriller author Sophie Hannah hosting a writing workshop, with one place left. Vikki had booked and interviewed Sophie for our local book festival and I thought it was something that would at least get me out of the house. At the event, Sophie said she had become course director for a new part-time Master of Studies degree in Crime and Thriller Writing at Cambridge University. She suggested I apply. 

That day, though not an easy one with my grief still raw, marked the first stirring in me of a desire to write again, and I would go on over the next year to pen a memoir about Vikki, and watching cricket to deal with my grief, entitled The Breath of Sadness. It also got me thinking about applying for Sophie’s course. After considering it for a month, I did and was awarded a place.

I went to Cambridge with the germ of an idea – a premise - for another novel. What would be the consequences if somebody walked into an AA meeting and shared that they might have killed their partner in a drunken blackout? From there, over the next two years of our Covid-interrupted course, DON’T TALK took shape. 

Thus am I grateful first to Sophie for helping set me back on my writing path, then her expertise in imparting the intricacies of plot, structure, hooks and twists that have gone into this book and helped progress the original idea. I am also grateful for the support and knowledge of Midge Gillies and Elly Griffiths at Cambridge, along with my supervisors Emily Winslow and Jon Appleton. The feedback and fellowship from my fellow students, notably Tracey Ann Morton and Matt Williams, has been a huge help through a tough time.

In that regard, I don’t think I would coped without the love and practical help of my loving and loved children, Alex and Jack. Alex has also helped me set up and run V Books. I am immensely proud of, and grateful for, two wonderful human beings.

For personal and pastoral help, my thanks go to Tony Adams, Jimmy Mulville, Ian Chapman, Steve Claridge, Seth Burkett, Mike McMonagle, Rev Tom Sander, Shekhar Bhatia, Emma and Richard Visick, Moira Thoubboron, Serena Bird, Janet King, Jane Purdon, Amanda Smith, Amanda Newbery, Sacha Sachag, Jackie Brock-Doyle, Daniela Sieff, Liz Sparke and Rosemary Clough.

Thanks also my skilful and perceptive editor Claire Baldwin, brilliant cover designer Steve Leard, and to three very different but all superb writers in Rev. Richard Coles, Candy Denman and Stephen Leather – Vikki’s great mate from her days as a news reporter on the Daily Mail – for reading this book and contributing cover quotes. Special thanks to ‘Monaco’ Mick O’Mahony, retired Metropolitan Police Flying Squad detective, for generously sharing his expertise and advising me on police procedures.

I will also be forever in the debt of Bill W and Bruce Lloyd, who both continue to save my life on a daily basis, and have done for 34 and 30 years respectively.

That life was enhanced for 23 of those years by my Vikki, for whom my gratitude will never die. It dawned on me at Cambridge that Jan Mason, the character I most enjoyed writing in OUTER CIRCLE probably because she was so Vikki, could now become the protagonist of a series of books. That way, I could take her wherever I wanted to go and she could still be with me whenever I wrote. I hope something in the resourceful and resilient Jan inspires you the way V continues to do with me.