Robert Vallier

I grew up on The Saint and Bond, and wanted to create a character midway between the two. The Falcon is no Saint, he doesn’t have The Saint’s morals; and he’s not Bond, he doesn’t work for MI6. But they would know each other if they passed in the street, well enough say hello. What finally brought me to the thriller genre as a writer was Alistair MacLean. As a boy I had read all of Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond books, then Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, and next went through Leslie Charteris’s The Saint. Then, in my early teens I discovered Alistair MacLean. What a wonderful storyteller! In particular his great book, Where Eagles Dare, and the film of the same name starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton. The plot keeps you on the edge of your seat all the time, and you don’t find out the final twist until the very end. And that’s what I’ve tried to do with Spider 2-3 – you don’t find out the full story until the last chapter and the last pages. So you mustn’t begin reading at the end, as some people do!

Yes, I’ve been to them all. I’ve stood outside the Lubyanka building in Moscow and looked up at Vashinsky’s office on the top floor; strolled on the beach in St Lucia where our heroine is snatched; walked along the sea road in Cape Town where they throw a bomb at The Falcon; flown myself to Musina, in the very north of South Africa on the border with Zimbabwe, where the terrorists land covertly to steal the 9M714K-Alpha from the Fincrest Centre. And of course, I know London very well. This thriller warranted an international setting, the locations are an intrinsic part to the operation.