Titanic 2020

I had tremendous fun writing my children’s trilogy, ‘The Gang With No Name’, so when it came to its natural end I was keen to have another go at writing a children’s novel. As it happens I was on a cruise with my wife - it was the first time for both of us and we quite enjoyed it, though it was a bit like being locked into a luxury hotel, great for a while but eventually you HAVE to escape – and so the idea of setting a children’s adventure on a cruise ship seemed to arrive almost fully formed.

I was well into the writing of Jimmy’s story - he’s stows away by ‘accident’ at the same time as a plague wipes out civilisation – and I was calling the ship ‘The Emperor of the Seas’ after the cruise ship I’d been on, when I suddenly realised that the real story was right on my doorstep - The Titanic. Hadn’t it been built just up the road from where I was born? So I came up with the idea of a new Titanic being built, and Jimmy being descended from someone who had gone down on the original ship.

The second in the series, ‘Titanic 2020: Cannibal City’will be published in June 2008.