I've spent my professional life as a doctor. Although I have written medical and scientific papers, they're not really great works of literature, let's be honest.
I had the chance to visit Malaysia several years ago to teach medical students about genetics. One evening, after a hectic but very delicious meal at the Hook Sang restaurant in Johor Bahru (a city in the south of Malaysia which is not on anyone's bucket list), I sat in my hotel room and wrote a few paragraphs about the experience. I will never share those lines with the world; they were truly awful. I returned to Malaysia each year immersing myself in the culture, visiting Singapore, Malacca, Penang and Bangkok, eating everything I could. At some point I thought: 'Right, I'm going to write a novel'. I read many people's opinions on how a novel should be structured and decided to ignore all of them...
Hook Sang restaurant: Kampung chicken, anyone? You have to feel for that poor chicken.
It took me a year to write my first draft back at home in Stockton-on-Tees (another town which is not on anyone's bucket list). I allowed the story to evolve as I wrote and based many of the scenes on factual accounts of life in Ayutthaya (where? I'll write about that later) and on board 18th century Dutch East India trading ships (that made for interesting research...). My wife, Tracey, suggested that I remove most of the historical detail because, frankly, it got in the way of a good story. That hurt.
In 2019, having left the novel on my hard drive to 'mature' for a year, I felt that it needed a big dose of authenticity, so, after my last lecture trip, Tracey and I went to Bangkok, then to Ayutthaya (hang in there, I'll tell you all about it soon). Now, being a doctor, I tend to be fairly calm and I control my emotions but, as soon as we reached Ayutthaya, I squeezed out a tear or two, let me tell you. There's an energy in the ruined city that seeps into your soul. It's astonishing. I hope I have been able to capture some of that energy in the novel.
The novel reached a natural conclusion during the COVID19 pandemic, when we all had a bit more time on our hands. Then came endless revisions and chapter reshuffles until I felt happy to step back and say 'finished'. I have self-published with an amazing publishing team at Troubador who helped me turn my manuscript into a real book.
So, where on Earth did Imperial Secrets come from? Many hours of research. Many drafts. Many cold beers in the heat of South East Asia. But fundamentally, from my heart. This novel is a tribute to places I have grown to love. It's a journey that I hope many will share.
Royal temple ruins in Ayutthaya, November 2019
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