Thinking of Dad

[John Dean]

I’ve been thinking a lot about my Dad in recent days. I don’t know if it’s because his birthday was in June or because I have been doing some talks in libraries in Dumfries and Galloway where I live (Dad was a librarian) but whatever the reason he keeps popping into my mind.

Dad died several years ago now but always took an interest in my writing and, although I suspect he did not know it, he played a key role in the creation of the DCI Blizzard novel The Secrets Man, which has recently been published by The Book Folks.

The Secrets Man can trace its beginnings to one of the most difficult experiences of my life, the serious illness experienced by my father a couple of years before he died. Ironically, he was the very man who always suggested that I write about what I know.

As the illness, and the dementia that accompanied it, took control of his mind, he disappeared into another world, one where nothing was as it seemed. He would hallucinate in ways that were frighteningly real to him. And to his family.

During the times that he slept, I started to look around the hospital ward. What I saw was five other beds, five other patients, each of them in a world of their own. A man murmuring to someone who was not there, another man directing traffic that did not exist, a third conversing with someone he was convinced was his wife but wasn’t.

And as I watched, the idea for a novel started to roll out. What if one of the patients in a fictional hospital was an elderly villain who had been, in his heyday, the henchman of one of the city’s gang leaders? What if the elderly villain was known as The Secrets Man because he was the one entrusted with the secrets by the gang leader? What if, as illness unhinged his mind, his tongue was loosened and he started revealing those secrets? What if in the next bed was a retired detective who knew exactly what was he hearing and viewed the comments differently than those who simply wrote them as the ramblings of an ill old man? And what if one of the officer’s visitors was my main character DCI John Blizzard? Where would the story go from there? Who would want the old man silenced?

Of course, that’s where the fiction well and truly took over. None of the events in the novel took place but every time I stalled in the writing process, all I had to do was cast my mind back to the three months my Dad was in hospital and the inspiration flowed.

This was not an easy thing to do. Dad’s illness was a traumatic time in his life, and of those who loved him, and basing a novel on it was the furthest thing from my mind. But, as any writer will tell you, ideas have a life all of their own and when they come knocking you can’t really turn them away.

Before I wrote the novel, I felt I had to ask my family for their approval. What happened to Dad was painful and I did not want to exacerbate that even though what I had penned was a work of fiction.  They agreed I should write it; they know how the writer’s mind works.

And although the illness exacerbated his dementia to the extent that he probably did not understand when I explained the novel to him when he had come through the crisis, I like to think that he would have approved.

You can find out more about the boo at https://www.amazon.co.uk/SECRETS-MAN-gripping-murder-mystery-ebook/...