Burn Down Easy

Every book starts differently.

With Burn Down Easy, the first scene came into my head, a young girl dancing ballet in a blazing barn. I don't know why that image came to me and I couldn't for the life of me work out what it meant, I just knew that the rest of the book would have to explain it. I knew also that fire would play an important part in this, the most elemental of my stories.

I came up with the character of Billy, a young boy who is inexplicably drawn to starting fires and who has done time in a young offender's institution because of it. Then I thought of placing him next to an older, more experienced woman and I came up with Ella, a prostitute.

The third character, Myles, is possibly the most repellent character I've ever written, yet as my wife kindly pointed out to me, he and I have a lot in common! Like me, he came from a boarding school background. I went way back into my childhood and plucked out an incident from those days, a mock hanging performed on a young boy by a bullying prefect. I asked myself, how would that boy have turned out? And supposing he was still longing for revenge, all those years later?

There's a very Catholic tone to this book. (I was raised as a Roman Catholic, so maybe that's not surprising.) It's all about atonement for past sins and some of the imagery recalls paintings of burning martyrs. I also used an element of mystery in there, the phrase 'Red Beggar', which occurs early on and isn't resolved until the end. This is hardly surprising. I must confess that I didn't know the explanation myself until I was writing the final scene!

FACT: This time, I had terrible trouble working the title into the story. It seems easy enough, but whenever I used it in context, it just didn't seem right. Finally, it became the name of the (fictional) band that Billy claims to be a member of in a brief scene.