Peter May Meet the Author

almost zero.

OK. We will have to leave it there.

Professor Heald, many thanks. Thank

you.

Now its time for Meet the Author.

A car bomb in Paris. A widow

returns, joined by a detective and

with two women trying to work out

what happened and why. And their

lives are intertwined. A thriller by

Peter May called I'll Keep You Safe.

A puzzle where they cling to the old

ways. A puzzle and a story that

twists and turns and for him,

another international bestseller.

Welcome.

A rather obvious question: What

makes a good thriller, Peter?

A good

question! I have no idea!

You know

it when you see it?

I think that's

exactly right. There is no formula.

If you knew what the formula was,

you would have a bestseller with

every book you wrote. I think

engaging the reader more than

anything else. It is not just about

thrillers but any story you are

telling.

You set yourself a problem, as over

a couple of pages of the book you

have to give us a Scottish Gaelic

glossary, otherwise no-one

understands the names. A large part

is set in the Western Isles. It is

needed the guide. It is quite a

thing to do, suspect it?

It is. In

my dares working in television, I

have filmed in the Western Isles for

five months a year for five years

and got familiar with the sound of

Gaelic. I still don't speak it. But

I can generally know how to

pronounce names and words. But most

don't as I think that the Gaelic

alphabet is 18 letters. So it is

strange combinations of letters to

make a single sound.

Two of the main characters, with the

Gaelic spelling of Rory and Naeve

but you have to get #350e78 into the

sound world?

You do, yes. Otherwise

they are repeating in their heads a

mispronounciation from the start.

That bowled be unfortunate. What you

want to do in evoking the place, its

strange largely flat contours, it's

bleakness but its beauty that can

hold you in a trance on a fine day,

which, there are not that many of on

the west coast of Lewis. But it's a

very haunting place, isn't it?

It

is. I filmed up there at a daily

schedule, you were at the mercy of

the elements the whole time. They

were rarely in your favour.

So it was hard, hard work. It makes

such an impression on you. The

minute you step off the plane there,

you are struck by the wind. The wind

never stops. It is there the entire

time.

Very few trees! Let's talk about the

plot. As I said at the beginning,

there is an explosion. A car

explosion. A bomb. That's in Paris.

We can say that much. Then we are

off. What we have is a contrast

between a contemporary world, with

which we are familiar, strange,

violent events interrunting the

modern pattern of life, then we go

back to a old way of life where

people are clinging to making cloth

in the old way, talking with a

language that is shrinking in its

usage, quite fast. There is a

wonderful contrast between the two

worlds.

It was of great interest to me. I

went there 30 years ago. It is like

going back to the way I knew the

islands when I first went and the

way that they were. They had not

really changed in almost centuries.

It's sad to say that in a way it has

changed a bit over the last 30

years. When I first went there were

no flights on a Sunday, no ferries

on a Sunday. Nothing was open. You

could not eat or get petrol.

Everything was shut. Now that's all

changed. In a way it's a shame, the

loss of the Lewis Sabbath. It was a

special day.

They held on to that in a way that

nowhere else had. The contrast in

the book is very much a part of it.

What we have is the picture of two

women, one, Naeve, who has lost her

man in this explosion, who has gone

back and of course is

grieve-stricken. And the detective,

also a woman, who follows her. And

of course has her in her sights. So

they are opposing women but they

find themselves at the end of the

day drawn on to the same path.

It's a sort of classic plot device.

I don't mean it is fake but one of

the fundamental plot devices, isn't

it?

Yes, two women from very, very

different back grounds and

experiences, arriving, ultimately,

in the same landscape in the same

culture.

And having to function?

Yes, well,

absolutely. Naeve is suffering from

grief, obviously a deeply-felt

grief, and re-examining everything.

As a writer of this kind of novel,

you know, a good page-Turner, one

where people are involved in

inexplicable events that they have

to work very hard to unravel,

frankly, how do you keep the tension

going?

It's about what makes you

tense as a writer. It's a journey.

When you are writing a book, it's a

journey you go on yourself. If it is

a boring or a dull journey, it will

not work for the reader, will it?

That's right, you have to feel some

of that excitement?

Exactly. I was

doing an interview with BBC Radio

Scotland, doing a location radio

interview on the Isle of Lewis,

talking about the blackouts, the

first book that I had set up there.

We went to a slipway in a tiny

harbour in the north-east coast, I

had set a scene there in the book.

It was a scene that I had never

originally planned to do. It was a

bridging scene between two scenes

that I had worked out that I was

going to write about.

It turned into an extraordinarily

emotional ebbing Pyrenees for me

writing it.

-- emotional experience for me

writing it. I was sitting there,

with tears running down my face. My

wife shouted dinner was ready, and

asked what was wrong, I was like...

And yet when we back to the location

interview, it was built around a

couple of boats, and there were the

same boats that were there ten years

earlier. I choked up talking about

it. The emotion was so real.

What you are saying, it is

fundamental, in writing this kind of

book, in this one place, it is so

important, the atmospherics, you

can't fake it, and if you try you

will fail.

I think that is absolutely right.

And because I'm not from the

islands, there was always a risk, I

suppose, that I was doing, what I

was doing what some kind of parody

of what I saw, what I experienced. I

remember clearly when the Black

House came out, worrying how it

would be received on the islands.

How would the islanders going to

receive it, never mind the critics.

There is a sequence that happens,

involving ten men from the northern

part of the island that go out to a

rock in the Atlantic and fish and I

had done research with them and

written of the experience and

literally after the book came out I

got an e-mail from the head of that

group, I saw it was from him, Dodds,

McFarlane, and I opened it up. He

said that he and the boys had read

the book and that they loved it. It

was a big sigh of relief.

And when people begin this book,

they should make an effort with the

Gaelic glossary at the beginning as

it will make all the difference.

Indeed.