Driving Big Davie

In which Dan and his old friend Davie Kincaid go off on a Floridian road trip and get themselves involved in all sorts of local difficulties, including coming face to face with the gangster from Shooting Sean who devastated Dan`s life.

I kind of started this as a response to Joe Strummer`s death. Joe, lead singer of punk rockers The Clash, was a huge inspiration on my teenage years – hell, on all of my years, and it was a huge thrill when we got to use some Clash tracks in the film version of Divorcing Jack. He even wrote a title song - my own personal Clash song! – which wasn`t used in the end, though I still have a copy of it. His sudden death from a heart attack a few Christmasses ago was not only a shock, but brought home to all of the aging, balding, portly punk rockers that time was racing past. I think we all started examining our own mortality in the light of Joe`s death.

Anyway, I wrote a few lines of the book which started with Davie calling Dan out of the blue to talk about Joe`s death - and then I started to panic. You see, years ago I`d written a screenplay called Driving Big Davie, which was set in Scotland, about two friends driving to a wedding, who get snowbound in the Scottish highlands and get blamed for a murder and pursued by the paranoid villagers. I thought I`d use that basic idea for this novel - but I`d spent the last year writing Murphy`s Law non-stop and the deadline for delivering the book was fast approaching and I hadn`t even started writing it.

I hadn`t had the chance to go to Scotland to do even any basic research, and I was about to leave on a long planned holiday to Florida and I just knew I wasn`t going to enjoy it because of the book deadline. Then, on the plane, I had a brainwave. Bugger Scotland, set it in Florida! I`ve been to Florida quite a few times, so it meant there wasn`t that much research involved, and an exotic location opened up all sorts of possibilities and allowed me to keep the basic story of the screenplay, but at the same time meant I could veer wildly away from it. For example, the Don Cesar hotel was right next to where we were staying, and once I saw that I knew it would make a perfect location for a good part of the story.

We moved into it for three days over Easter two years ago and had a ball –and all in the name of research!