Trust No One

explore places that I know and love (or, in a very few cases, know and dislike!). It’s also brought home to me the remarkable diversity of the environment and landscape in the area – and I’ve only just begun to explore some of the more unexpected locations.

Do you spend a lot of time researching your novels?

One way or another, yes. But it’s a very varied mixture of activities. My non-writing life as a consultant means that I end up working in countless different types of organizations, both in the UK and overseas, so I often gain very direct experience of how things work. As it happens, I’ve spent a large part of the last decade working in various parts of the criminal justice sector – police, prisons, probation – so that’s given me a very solid grounding in the realities of that world (even where I’ve chosen to apply some fictional licence). Beyond that, I’ll go and talk to specific individuals about their particular fields of expertise and a lot of that will feed into the books, though often anonymously. And of course I spend a lot of time reading relevant background material and hunting about on the internet for information. One of the great advantages of the web as a research tool is that it’s now possible to obtain fairly easily the kind of trivial information (what’s the exact road layout in that particular part of the Lancashire coast?) that is irrelevant to most people, but is often critical to getting a fictional setting right.

Do your characters ever surprise you?

All the time. I tend to plot my books fairly carefully in outline, but leave a lot of space for the narrative to change direction or develop as I write. I find that the characters almost invariably take on a life of their own. Sometimes they just take off in a direction I didn’t expect – in one of my earlier books, this happened very early on and unexpectedly took the whole plot with it . . . for the better, fortunately! Sometimes apparently minor characters become much more significant as the book proceeds – that happened with at least one character in Trust No One. Very often, too, I find that, although the character has taken me by surprise, in fact I’ve already been working towards the new development without knowing it. One of my books had a major twist part-way through. I hadn’t planned the twist before reaching that chapter, but then I realized that I’d been unwittingly setting the scene for it for several chapters before. The subconscious mind is a strange thing – or at least mine is!

How much of your life and the people around you do you put into your books?

I’m always getting asked that, usually by nervous-looking friends. The truth is very little, at least directly. I’ve never written a character consciously based on a real person. But of course in creating a character you’re likely to draw on elements of people you know or have met. Quite often, I might have someone’s physical appearance in mind, but combined with quite a different personality or character. Equally, because I spend a lot of time working in different organizations, my depictions of organizational politics or tensions – how bosses treat their teams, how people try to manipulate others or exercise control – are often loosely based on people or incidents that I’ve observed – though I’d never say where!

I should say that there’s one specific aspect of Trust No One which does draw directly on my own life, and I hesitated for a long while before deciding to include it. My late wife, Christine, died tragically young as a result of multiple sclerosis, and I wanted to write about that – partly as a tribute to her courage and partly to help raise awareness of the impact of this illness. But I was concerned about the risk of trivializing the subject if it were to become just another plot-device. In the end, I just tried to write about it as openly and honestly as I could, drawing on our own experiences. No case of MS can be described as ‘typical’ because the effects of the illness are so varied, and Christine’s symptoms were more extreme and aggressive than many. Liam’s illness in the book isn’t the same as hers, and his relationship with Marie is certainly very different from our marriage, but I hope that I’ve managed to convey some of the emotions – the fears, the anxieties, the uncertainties – that face those who are diagnosed with MS. Christine’s love and support made it possible for me to write in the first place, and I hope that the book does some justice to her memory.

About the Author

ALEX WALTERS was educated in Nottingham and at Cambridge University. After leaving university, he worked in management roles in the oil industry, broadcasting and banking, before moving into management consultancy. Having worked for various global practices, he now runs his own specialist consultancy company, working in the UK and abroad. His consultancy work in recent years has specialized in various aspects of the criminal justice sector, including police, prisons and probation, as well as various public bodies including the UK parliament. He lives in Manchester with his three sons.

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