The Judas Case is a novel written on the run. Three cities, six rooms, repeated journeys. Cafes and waiting rooms my places of work. Prose composed across the north of England at a velocity of 125mph.
For a long time I used to get up early on a Monday morning,
drive to Penrith and take a train, hoping that this week I’d get lucky with Richard
Branson’s perpetually ‘run out at Lockerbie’ smoked salmon and scrambled eggs
breakfast, to work in the West Midlands. For 3 and a half hours it became my workplace
and mobile writing shed. The faces returned: itinerant academics alighting at Lancaster and
Preston, travellers to Warrington and Stafford. They began to recognise me – “Oh,
the guy with the notebook”. None ever asked what I was writing. Weekday
evenings were spent writing at my favourite window table in the legendary Brown’s
Bar in Coventry where the furniture spoke of a space-age 1950s that had never
quite become the future we expected. Thursday
afternoon: the return. Cold drinks service after Wolverhampton: sharp sauvignon
blanc and Shlomo’s memories of his vineyard and his return to his Zenobia.
For a year of early mornings I wrote at a table in the Costa
concession at Manchester Piccadilly high above the concourse opposite a gigantic
LED-rendering of Caspar David Freidrich’s ‘Wanderer Above the Sea Of Fog’. A large
Americano and croissant. Fifty minutes of drafting Shlomo’s unrivalled
experience of riots while the announcer told me that due to wet weather the
concourse was extremely slippery this morning, and the Wanderer stared into
vacancy down the tracks. Then to the
Sackville Building, where Ernest Rutherford once split atomic nuclei, and blamelessly
well-paid drudgery running corporate IT projects for the lineal successors of
Alan Turing. Evenings crouched over an
improvised fold-out table in the spare room of elder daughter’s Northern Quarter
flat.
For seven months I wrote in a studio flat in Edinburgh Old Town at the end of a walk back from work that took me through the Grassmarket
and past Greyfriars’ churchyard. Exhausted revision of Shlomo’s investigation
of the empty tomb. Then three winter months
of weeknight re-drafting in an apartment hotel at the Holyrood end of the High
Street where I was briefly snowbound by the Beast From The East.
The first draft was finished at a port-side table on the
upper deck of a ship moored at a dock in southern Italy in September 2016. In order to maintain professional standards
of mystery and suspense, the name of the ship and the exact location must await
revelation in another post.
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