scaling background

Back to books

Into the Blue

Into the Blue

Magnify this jacket using your mouse…

Harry Barnett is a middle-aged failure, leading a shabby existence in the shadow of a past disgrace, reduced to caretaking a friend's villa on the island of Rhodes and working in a bar to earn his keep. Then a guest at the villa - a young woman he had instantly and innocently warmed to - disappears on a mountain peak.

Under suspicion of her murder, Harry stumbles on a set of photographs taken by Heather Mallender in the weeks before her disappearance. Desperately, obsessed by the mystery that has changed his life, he begins to trace back the movements and encounters that led to the moment when she vanished into the blue. The trail leads him back to England, to a world he thought he had left for ever, and at every step of the way a new and baffling light is shed on all the assumptions that have made Harry what he is.

Harry Barnett, full name Harold Mosley Barnett, burst (or more accurately shambled) into the literary world in my fourth novel. I had no idea then that he would appear in another two novels and a short story, but he has proved to be my most durable central character and a favourite among readers, despite his lifelong lack of drive, ambition and commitment.

These deficiencies have not, of course, prevented him becoming caught up in several convoluted mysteries, of which Into the Blue was the first. I chose an ordinary, unremarkable middle-aged man as my protagonist quite deliberately, because I wanted to explore how a humdrum life can turn out not to be so humdrum when subjected to the stresses and strains of the kind of plot I like to devise.

I recall the idea for this story took root when I collected some snaps from the developer and realized I’d forgotten taking many of the photographs, thanks to my tendency to use up a film very slowly. I noticed the pictures were printed in reverse order, so that I voyaged back in time as I leafed through them, and reflected that looking through someone else’s photographs would give you a series of tantalizing visual clues about their life. The plot of Into the Blue grew from that and a set of photographs becomes the trail Harry follows in his search for a missing girl whose disappearance he is unjustly blamed for.

Ah, printed photographs you collect from the developer: it’s amazing how the rapid advances of technology turn books I originally wrote in bang up-to-date style into works of historical fiction. Harry valiantly pumps coins into call-boxes when he wants to contact anyone urgently and cashes cheques if he can find anyone who’ll cash them for him. (This was 1988 and by my reckoning Harry’s finances weren’t stable enough to qualify him for a credit card until the mid-nineties.)

So, take a trip back with Harry to those pre-mobile non-digital days and discover that there was more to the Swindon of his youth than railway sidings. Just how much more – and what kind of more – lies at the heart of the story.

And don’t worry if Swindon doesn’t float your boat. We spend a lot of time in the sun-splashed Aegean as well. That’s the reason – well, one of the reasons – why this book is called Into the Blue.

'A book that will push the edges of late night fatigue…had me utterly spellbound…cracking good entertainment'

Washington Post

'Impossible to put down…Totally compels you from the first page to the last…a wonderful storyteller'

Yorkshire Post

'A cracker, twisting, turning and exploding with real skill'

Daily Mirror