All Episodes
Previous Next
April 20, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
56:56
Edition 445 - Peter May

Author, journalist and ITV scriptwriter Peter May on "Lockdown" - a book written 15 years before it happened and forgotten - but now making worldwide headlines - *Listener discretion advised.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for the lovely emails that you've been sending.
I hope that the shows are helping in some way.
Some of you say that that's exactly what they're doing.
At least maybe they're helping you to fill your time during these hours and days of lockdown.
As for myself, I've been really busy, actually.
I've been making tasks for myself, doing recordings, all sorts of things.
I'm even doing my radio show from home.
And I've been learning each and every day.
And, you know, I prepare once a week for my trip to the supermarket.
And that's it.
So I guess, you know, in my little tiny apartment, I'm one of the lucky ones.
And my thoughts go out to you.
If this has caused you real personal difficulties, as it has for so many people, all we can do is hope and pray that medical science, which I believe it will, will bring us a solution to this situation sooner rather than later.
And we have to trust to the people who are making decisions that they make the right ones.
Thank you very much to my webmaster, Adam, for his continued hard work on the show through all of these difficult weeks.
I'm going to do a couple of shout-outs, and then we're going to get to the guest who wrote a book 15 years ago called Lockdown.
Can you believe that?
Lockdown was a word that nobody knew until recently.
This book is about the effect of a pandemic on London.
It wasn't published because publishers thought it was too far-fetched back then.
But Peter May has had this book published recently.
It is available for you now.
And although it's a more extreme scenario, it's a more dystopian future than what we're living through now in London, it is astonishingly, what's that word, prescient in these times.
And that's why Peter's book has been published after being in a draw for 15 years and why he's being interviewed by organizations like CNN.
And I heard him on a radio station in New Zealand last weekend.
And I thought, I've got to get him on the show.
So what you're about to hear is Peter May talking about his book, Lockdown, and the research that he did for this.
And you're going to hear it exactly as radio listeners will have heard it on Sunday.
So literally, I'm going to play that for you.
It's been recorded here just now.
So that's the way we're going to do it.
Peter May talking about lockdown and the research that he did for this.
We think you'll find it fascinating.
A couple of shout-outs.
James in Taunton says he's been listening for a couple of years now and says thank you.
Well, thank you for listening, Peter.
He's in lockdown in Somerset.
Usually listen to the podcast on his daily commute, but now doing it at home.
Particularly enjoys shows featuring Paul Sinclair, who will be back, and Cryptozoology.
We'll do some more of them.
Also enjoyed Philip Jackson in Tokyo.
He'll be listening now and will be really pleased.
Thank you for that, James.
Keela, Kyler, in Papua New Guinea, who made contact recently.
Couple of questions, Keila has.
Will Liverpool Football Club be given the EPL, the English Premier League title?
I don't know.
I suspect so.
I'm not sure.
I should follow these things more than I do because my dad was a Liverpool FC fanatic.
But, you know, check the news websites, Kyla, Keela, and I'm sure it'll be there.
And have you had Jordan Maxwell on the program?
We are trying, okay?
Thank you very much for listening, Keila, from Papua New Guinea.
Ed in Stroud, nice to hear from you, Ed.
Lewis and the Fredericksons in Australia, nice to hear from you.
Layla, also in Australia.
Shane in Sydney, Australia, nice to hear from you.
Ishmael, nice to hear from you.
Dan in Peterborough.
Anne in Cradley Heath.
Sylvia, Antonia in Essex, Stew and Toby in Stubbington near Ferrum and Leon Solent.
A place that I know very well because I used to work on Ocean FM and Power FM.
And Toby, you will know those radio stations because they were definitely part of my life.
So nice to hear from somebody very near Ferrum and Leon Solent down in Hampshire on the coast there.
If you want to get in touch with me, please go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link from there.
You can send me an email about anything you want.
Let's get to the guest now.
In France, Peter May.
I'm going to talk about his book, Lockdown.
Peter, I'm sorry for going on at such length.
How are you?
I'm very well, thank you, Heard.
How are you?
I'm very good.
But, you know, it's sheer serendipity.
It is just one of those things that I happen to find you.
And I really am glad that I did.
Have you been doing a lot of interviews lately?
I have been snowed under, Heard.
It's just never stopped.
I mean, I'm doing three or four a day.
I've been doing live radio and television around the world, all from my little studio at my home in France.
It's an extraordinary experience, really.
And how does it feel then?
How does it feel to be in that situation all of a sudden?
Weird and totally unexpected.
It still feels unreal to me, everything that's happened since this book was kind of unearthed from the depths of my long-forgotten memory.
And it has, if you'll excuse the pun, it's just gone viral.
Well, it has.
I actually saw, once I heard that interview with you, I thought, okay, who else has spoken to him?
You were a journalist, you understand all of this stuff.
And you start doing your research and you start thinking, who else has he spoken to?
Has anything been written about him?
And so the first thing that came up was a piece that was written about you on CNN.
So you really are spreading around the world.
Yeah, I did CNN live on tele the other day, which was a new experience to me as well.
Yeah, they carried it in print or on their website, as well as live on tele.
I was doing live TV with a 24-hour news station in Nigeria, would you believe?
They did a huge item on the publication of the book.
And, well, it seems to be in demand everywhere.
And I thought I was going to have a nice quiet time in this lockdown.
And it's just turned into quite the contrary.
We'll talk all about the book in a little while.
I want to talk about you first.
First of all, you are in lockdown as I am in lockdown.
Whereabouts in France are you locked down?
I'm in the southwest of France, about two hours north of Toulouse.
It's a very rural area.
And I'm in the Departement du Lotte.
You might think this would be not a particularly dangerous area as far as the coronavirus is concerned.
But we follow all the local news and all the local web pages from the local Marys, the different towns and villages.
And it seems there has been a spike in nursing homes all around us here.
And there have been deaths, a lot of people taken to hospital.
And of course, as you know, with this virus, it just spreads like, you know, throw a stone into water and the ripples spread out from it.
You know, all those workers in the care homes going back to their families.
Those families then going out shopping, doing their essential shopping every week.
You know, this is just how it spreads.
So it's quite alarming, really.
And we're just hunkered down here staying home.
I go out once a week to do the shopping, and that's it.
How are the French coping with it?
Because, look, I have a lot of time for France.
I love the place.
Their attitude to authority and being told what to do is and has been through history slightly different from ours, as we've seen through various events, including there was an uprising in 1968.
People tend to get out on the streets if there is something that they don't like.
Have they adhered to the regulations?
Are they doing what they're supposed to do?
Yeah, by and large, yes.
I think possibly better so than the UK.
I mean, it's very strict and stringent here, and people seem to be abiding by that.
I know it's not in the French character to just bow down to authority like that.
As you say, they're out in the streets very often, very regularly, when they take exception to things that the government is doing.
But this, I think, people understand is grave.
And, you know, if you have to download a PDF from a government website and you print off every time you go out what's called an attestation, you have to fill in the date, the time, the place.
You have to sign it and you have to select one of the allowed reasons for being out.
And you must carry that with you along with your ID card.
And if you're stopped by the gendarmes and you don't have either of those things, you're subject to an immediate fine.
And I think it's about 350 euros, which is pretty steep.
If you're caught twice in that situation, the fine jumps up to over 700 euros.
If you're caught three times, it's over 3,000 and up to six months in prison.
So, you know, they're applying it very, very strictly.
And it seems to me that by and large, people are pretty much rigidly adhering to it.
And when is your government indicating to you, I have to say, I haven't followed the French situation perhaps as closely as I have the American situation.
When is your government saying that you might be able to start to relax the lockdown?
Is that being talked about?
Yes.
Well, Macron did a national broadcast on Monday night in which he extended the lockdown at least until May the 11th.
And there are certain areas there being slight relaxations in, but primarily the main part of the lockdown will continue to May the 11th.
But he was saying, you know, at that point they will review it again.
And it is likely that they will begin some kind of very slow lifting of the lockdown.
But things like restaurants, bars, cafes, hotels, the whole tourist industry, they believe can't even look at being lifted from lockdown until mid-July.
And that's, you know, at the very earliest.
Are people, I mean, this almost goes without saying, really.
So I hope it isn't too crass a question.
People around you, people you know, are they worried about this economically and in every other way?
Oh, yes.
I mean, people are under huge economic stress.
I mean, I think this applies to people everywhere.
People who are employed and subsidized by their employers, that's fine.
Governments, of course, promise to support workers who are affected by this, but the speed with which that money is made available and the ease of access is questionable.
I know my electrician here is under financial stress.
He can't work.
He's having trouble accessing government subsidy to see him through this.
So I find myself helping him out in this situation because he's a single dad at home alone with his teenage daughter.
So they need help.
People need help.
It's a horrendous situation, really.
And we've all got to pitch in for each other.
I think that is a lesson and a penny that's dropping here in the United Kingdom as well, Peter.
I think so.
Absolutely.
You know, we're all in this together.
Nobody's immune from it.
We have to help one another.
And it's about solidarity and sticking together, fraternity, as we would call it in France.
You know, that's the only way we're going to get through this.
I think so.
Well, listen, thank you for just telling me how things are in France.
I think our listener will be interested in that because some countries we don't hear as much from, perhaps, as we should.
And France, of course, being our nearest neighbor here.
Now, before we talk about the genesis of the book and how this book has resurfaced and now that there's a firestorm of publicity for you around it and interest in it, talk to me about you because the descriptions that came up when I searched you, author, journalist, screenwriter.
So just give me a little thumbnail sketch of you.
Well, I started my career as a journalist in the 1970s with a local newspaper.
I won an award for Scotland's Young Journalist of the Year, and that propelled me onto the Scotsman newspaper, which was then the top quality newspaper in Scotland.
I was there for five years, and it was while I was there That I got my first book published.
It was a book about a journalist, an investigative reporter, and the book was, strangely enough, called The Reporter.
And along with a colleague, I developed that idea and that character for television.
And we were very fortunate that an incoming head of drama at BBC Scotland took a fancy to it.
And we made it.
It was a series called The Standard.
It was 13 one-hour episodes that was broadcast in 1978.
And after that, basically, I left journalism to try and make a living then as a writer.
I got involved in a new soap opera in Scotland called Take the High Road, where I very quickly became story editor and then script editor.
And I did that for eight years.
We were the top-rated show in Scotland.
But I quit then to try and do other things.
And a couple of years later, my wife, who's also a writer, and myself created a soap opera in the Gaelic language.
Money had become available from the government to subsidize cultural projects like that.
And we made this series called Macha, which was filmed entirely on location on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.
Wow.
How lovely.
Well, I'm saying how lovely, the location.
I'm not sure about the story.
Well, I mean, the location, yeah, it's an extraordinary place, but you try filming in it every day in the kind of weather that that island is subject to.
I mean, the wind never stops.
And, you know, the weather can go through four seasons in five minutes.
And when you're shooting single camera and trying to do continuity, I mean, it can be a nightmare.
So it was pretty stressful, but very successful.
And I did that for six years.
And then I quit television altogether in 96 to try and make a living from writing books, which is what I had always wanted to do in the first place.
And the first thing I wrote was a series of six books known as the China Thrillers, six books set in China with the main character being a Chinese police officer and the second character being an American female pathologist who was seconded to work with them.
And that was, it was relatively successful at the time, but it's very hard to make a living from writing books alone.
And we were kind of scratching by.
And I wrote a book, I think it was about 2004, called The Black House.
And I'd gone back to all that time I'd spent on the Isle of Lewis.
And I wrote this book, which was set on the island and based around a kind of ritual thing that happens there every year.
And I thought it was the best thing I'd ever written at the time.
And it was roundly rejected by every publisher in the UK.
That's a shame.
I mean, from the way you described it, it sounded like a sort of another version of The Wicker Man.
Well, yeah.
The irony, of course, is that, you know, four years later, five years later, my French publisher read the manuscript, loved it, bought world rights.
It got translated into French, published in France, became a bestseller here.
They sold the rights then around the world, finally to the UK, where that book and the subsequent two books that became known as the Lewis Trilogy have sold literally millions of copies.
And it was the book that projected my career into being kind of international bestseller.
But, you know, at that time, had been rejected by everybody.
And it was around about that time also that I wrote Lockdown, which was also rejected for different reasons.
Okay, we will talk about that.
I was just interested to get a handle on you.
One of the most interesting things that came out of one of the biographies that I read, and it might even have been the one that you wrote yourself for your own website.
I can't remember now.
I've seen so much stuff today, suggested that lockdown, and we said it was prescient.
We said that it predicted a situation that we are now actually in, although many people didn't believe that that could happen, and they thought it was too far-fetched.
That was then, this is now.
You had a bit of a habit of writing things that subsequently came to happen.
In other words, of life imitating your art.
Yes, it's a kind of strange, spooky thing that has dogged me throughout my career.
Going right back to my early days writing soap opera in Scotland when I was story editor, I can remember we wrote, we came up with a story for a character.
He fell off a ladder and broke his arm, led to all sorts of things.
Three weeks later, the actor fell off a ladder and broke his arm, which was spooky enough.
But we were then we were running a story about a young girl who becomes pregnant.
Lo and behold, the actress got pregnant.
And there were several things like that happened.
And it became a kind of subject of discussion in the green room among the cast.
And, you know, I would have meetings with cast, you know, bump past them in the corridor and they'd be smiling nervously and saying, hope you're not thinking of writing my character out, you know, killing my character off.
Or do they see you as a jinx?
Well, I mean, it was, well, it was kind of spooky, you know, and people, I remember one actor came knocking in my office door and said, how about writing a story where I win the lottery?
Well, you know, I was going to say, you know, how about writing a story about a broadcaster who does a radio show on talk radio, does podcasts as well, who suddenly gets a million pound contract?
It's just an idle thought, really.
But you had this habit.
Sorry.
So I was just going to say, how much is that worth to you?
Well, I have to say, a pretty sizable percentage, people.
I think we've identified, I think, a whole new revenue stream for you, certainly one for me.
But look, beyond that, though, did you start to think of yourself as somebody who perhaps connected with something That made you write these things in advance of the things actually happening?
Well, I mean, I did go on to write some when I was writing my books, the China series, for example.
The first of those books is all about OGM.
It was the creation of a genetically modified rice which went wrong.
Two years later, they announced that they had produced a genetically modified rice called Golden Rice, and that went through great controversial problems.
And I think it is only, its subsequent generation has only just been approved.
Another in that series was about bioterrorism, but the book opened with the discovery of a freezer truck standing empty in a parking lot in Texas.
And when they open it up, they find 90-odd dead Chinese illegal immigrants in the back of it.
And we all know, we've all heard that story in reality.
In fact, it has happened several times since I wrote it.
So, I mean, things like that.
I mean, there was an even more bizarre thing where my pathology advisor had suggested not a trick, but a means for me to have one of my characters impress another by showing great skill in their chosen profession.
And this is the pathologist, the doctor, who encounters a woman in a road accident in China who has severed her femoral artery, which is an artery deep in the vein of the thigh.
And you can't just close off the blood with a tourniquet because it's too deep.
And he had suggested that my characters would stand on the woman's leg, bringing the full weight to bear to stop the bleeding.
And I wrote that scene.
And about a year later, that pathology advisor who became a friend of mine came over with his family to visit us in France.
And we went down to the local marketplace and we saw this straumash going on in the main square.
And we pushed through the crowd.
And on the terrace was a woman lying on the tiles with blood gouting from this horrendous wound in her leg.
She had tripped and fallen onto the metal tubing of a parasol stand and it had just gouged right into her leg.
And guess what?
It had severed her femoral artery.
Now, here's the pathologist who suggested how, you know, one might deal with that.
He didn't, I'm happy to say, stand on her, but he did get down on his hands and knees and he got his hand into that wound and he found the end of the artery and he pinched it shut and he saved her life.
And I can remember standing there afterwards thinking, gosh, if I hadn't decided to write this series of books and needed a pathology advisor and made contact with this guy who became my friend, he wouldn't have been in France in that square that day.
And that woman would almost certainly have died.
You absolutely belong on this show without the smallest shadow of doubt.
Now, if you, I have to say this because it's important, even though it is after midnight.
If you are frightened by fictional scenarios that have some relation to what is going on at the moment, if these things are too much for you at this time, I totally get it.
So please just go make a cup of coffee, do whatever you want to do, listen to one of my podcasts or do something else.
I would not want to upset you or cause you difficulties.
If you are as fascinated by this as I am, then stay where we are right now.
Let's reconnect to Peter May in France.
And Peter, that's absolutely true, isn't it?
This idea that you had was a long way ahead of its time, astonishingly so, and inspired by events that were going on in 2005.
The genesis of the book actually goes back to about 2000.
I mentioned earlier a book which I had written called Snakehead, which was one of the China thrillers, although it was set in the US.
And it was about bioterrorists.
And they had isolated the Spanish flu virus, which had so devastated the population of the world in 1918.
And they were weaponizing it to use against the United States.
So I'd done a huge amount of research into that at the time.
And when I came to write that book, I had based a character who was somebody, a Russian guy who had been in charge of the Soviet Union's bioterrorism development during the 70s, 80s and 90s in controversion of all international treaties.
He had gone over to the Americans and all was revealed.
I read a fascinating book about this.
But I based the character in the book on this guy.
I called him Anatoly Markin.
And he is addressing a group of scientists and investigators about the effects of the Spanish flu virus.
I can read you a couple of just short bits from that that give you a sense of...
And many doctors believe that it is only a matter of time before a similar pandemic strikes again, that we are, in fact, merely in an inter-pandemic period.
It's prophetic.
Wow.
He goes on to say, the Spanish flu is incredibly infectious.
In 1918, American people stopped going out of their homes.
If they did, they wore face masks.
Shops were shut.
Public meetings were cancelled.
Funerals were banned.
Some more isolated communities put armed guards on the roads into their towns and villages and shot anyone who approached.
Today, with modern travel, increased communications, increased populations, the death toll would be devastating.
Hospitals and public health services simply couldn't cope.
They would quickly break down.
No one would be immune.
Soldiers, police officers, health workers, they would all be as vulnerable as anyone else.
A complete breakdown of law and order would almost certainly follow.
Now, I wrote that in 2000, and that was as a result Of my research into the Spanish flu and also what the Russians had been doing.
And this character goes on to tell these people that the reason he knows that all this is going to happen is because the Soviets did advanced planning and working out exactly what would be the response and the effect of bombarding the United States with biological weapons.
So that was the kind of genesis of it.
And a couple of years later, I got interested in the SARS outbreak.
I think that was about 2002.
And it actually fizzled out, fortunately, but it put the idea into my head that I might write a story in one of my China thriller books where Beijing was under pandemic lockdown and there was a murder investigation going on.
And so I'd done a bit of research and planning on that.
And then my publisher pulled the plug on the China series.
And I'd written The Black House and it was rejected.
And I was scratching about for something else to write.
And I went back to this idea, only I did some more research about what the current thinking was.
And the current thinking at that time among the scientists was that the next major pandemic was going to be bird flu, avian flu, H5N1, and that it would be devastating.
It would have a 60 to 80 percent mortality rate, which is far, far higher than the coronavirus.
Although the actual bird flu itself is less infectious than coronavirus.
But it's still, I mean, the death rate would just be off the scale.
And so I did a lot of research into that.
And then I managed to get hold of pandemic preparedness plans of the British and American governments and was able to then look in detail at what governments would do to deal with a pandemic on that scale.
And using all that material, I started putting together my picture of what London would look like under a pandemic lockdown.
I mean, look, it is the kind of thing, look, I was working as a journalist.
I was doing radio news at that time.
And those outbreaks that you talked about were flickering pictures on the CNN screen in the newsroom.
They didn't seem, it was terribly sad.
And of course, we reported them in the news, usually halfway down the bulletin.
But I don't think any of us here, if we're honest, ever thought that any of that that we were watching then could ever apply to us.
But you thought beyond that.
Yes, because the fears of the scientific community at that time were very, very real.
They believed that something like this was imminent.
And I looked at it, and I mean, there are elements of this I won't talk about because they would be spoilers for the story.
But I looked at it in some detail and thought, okay, let's assume this happens.
Let's take a major Western capital city, London, because that's the city I knew best, and see how it would be affected if this actually came to pass.
And so using all the information I had, I created this very detailed picture, which included the things that we all recognize now, the empty streets, the shops and businesses shuttered up, the building of emergency hospitals, the taking over of conference centers to handle overspill from hospitals, crematoria, just absolutely overwhelmed with numbers.
All of these things come into play in the book.
And I tried to create this picture.
But in a sense, I mean, I'm a crime writer.
I write crime thrillers.
I wanted to write a story with that as the backdrop to it.
And so the book itself is really a kind of fast-paced thriller that takes place over 24 hours, and it's a murder investigation.
It is.
It's an extraordinary murder investigation.
You did a lot of research for this, and you said to me that you looked at the, as they stood in the 2000s, the preparedness plans of the United Kingdom and the preparedness plans of the United States.
Most of us were not aware of these things.
I really honestly, and I read the newspapers like everybody else, I don't think I saw anything about this kind of thing.
Oddly enough, until last year, there was a report for the United Nations last September that predicted an awful lot of these things and said that we're not ready for it.
But most of this passed me by.
Most of us were watching friends on the TV, following domestic politics and commenting on it.
And that was probably about the size of it.
So this was something that was so beyond any of our experience.
What did those preparedness plans that most of us didn't bother to look at, what sorts of things were in there?
Well, everything that you'll find in the book and everything that's happening now, all the measures that have been taken with social distancing, the wearing of masks, the closing down of any kind of public meeting, just everything that we're used to.
They saw.
I mean, here's what I believe, Howard.
I think that we were better prepared for it back then because these documents existed.
People had sat down and studied what would happen if the worst were to take place and they were prepared for it.
They had worked it all out.
And one of the characters in my book is an investigator for the Health Protection Agency who is trying to track down the source of the virus because London is the epicenter.
The Health Protection Agency no longer exists.
It was disbanded in 2013, dismantled, and bits and pieces of it fed off to various other departments.
As you probably know, as most people probably know, the government ran a dry run test in 2016 to see how the National Health Service would cope in the event of a pandemic.
And it failed catastrophically, not because of any shortcomings in the people who work in the NHS, but because it was so understaffed, under-financed, under-equipped.
And they wouldn't even publish the results because they were too scary.
But here's the key: they didn't do anything to improve it, they didn't make any changes.
And so we were wholly unprepared for this when it came onto us.
And I mean, possibly even worse in America, you know, where the people who'd been briefed on pandemic preparedness by the outgoing Obama administration are no longer there in the Trump administration because the turnover of people in Trump's administration is so great.
It's sort of like two-thirds of them are gone.
So the people who knew how to deal with this weren't there anymore.
Right.
So the work of fiction that you wrote at the time you wrote it was definitely was not something that most people thought could happen.
And you think, in your opinion, that the way things have gone in more recent years have made it more likely?
Not so much more likely, but in the event of it happening, we're not as well prepared to deal with it as we were.
And I think that's come over many years of cost cutting and people politically deciding priorities and deciding at the end of the day that in their view, pandemics would be unlikely.
And so they'll prioritize spending here or there or somewhere else, but not on that.
To me, it's as insane as saying, I'm not going to take out house insurance and contents insurance because I don't believe anything's ever going to happen to my house.
And, you know, none of us do that.
We all take house insurance and contents insurance because even although we believe and hope that nothing's going to happen, you know, it might and we're prepared for it.
But in the interests of fairness and balance, as they say, I think an awful lot of us didn't have this on our radar.
I mean, admittedly, there are people who are paid to have this on their radar who should have had it on their radar, but there are all kinds of things that have happened that we couldn't have foreseen to the extent that they occurred, like the level of flooding that we've had recently, some of the bizarre climatic and weather events that have happened in this country and other countries as well.
So there are many things and governments have priorities.
And I guess this has been maybe, arguably, possibly moving down the list of priorities over the years.
But then all of that paves the way for the dystopian reality as it is in your book of what you say happened in this London that you wrote about 15 years ago.
Yeah.
I mean, nobody expects, or at least I don't think they expect there to be a pandemic, but they can look at the scientific evidence and project possibilities and say, well, we hope this will never happen.
And I think, you know, people back then people hoped it would never happen.
But I was just simply taking those fears and that scientific background and projecting it into a reality.
The problem was that when I came to try and sell that to publishers.
They didn't want to know.
No, well, they said, well, this is totally unrealistic.
You can't imagine a Western capital like London being closed down because of a virus.
This couldn't happen.
This is science fiction.
This isn't crime genre material.
And so it was roundly rejected and went into my metaphorical file drawer where it has been gathering dust ever since.
Until now.
When you were doing the preparation for it, you checked out various documents.
Did you speak to any people who may have been in positions of power or authority at that time or may previously have been so?
Did you run it past anybody?
No, I didn't.
I just worked purely on the science that I'd researched and also on the pandemic preparedness documents.
I mean, many other aspects of the story, the kind of forensic anthropology and various other elements, you know, I go and find experts for stuff like that.
But I mean, really, there was no go-to person to say, is this right?
Is this what would happen?
Because, you know, nobody had any experience of it.
So how did you feel then after you created this thing?
And it obviously was very clear in your mind that this was a scenario that could come to pass, even though none of us were thinking that way at that time.
You were.
How did that feel?
Was that something that weighed heavily on your mind?
I mean, at the time, I was very frustrated because obviously you do the research on something and you think, well, this is a realistic background.
This is how it would be if this happened.
But nobody believed me.
And, you know, that's frustrating because, you know, surely, trust me, I've done this for a few years now.
I've done my research.
This is how it could be.
And yes, it's not the way it is, but it could be like that.
But nobody was, apparently, prepared to accept that.
Which, of course, they are now.
What about the title?
Just as we conclude this segment of our conversation, what about the title, Lockdown?
Did that come easily?
Well, yeah, because I mean, lockdown, they talk about lockdown in the book.
This is a concept that's existed for some length of time.
I don't think I didn't originally call it lockdown when I was, you know, when my working title, but, you know, it seemed on completion that that was the obvious title to go for.
Wow.
And now, I had a girlfriend once who used to say she was American.
Howie, hindsight is 2020.
In the case of you and this book, that's absolutely for sure.
Peter May in France, stay right there.
We're going to be coming back and talking more about the actual plot and the similarities with where we stand at the moment with Peter in just a second.
And just to say, as I said at the beginning of this, if you are easily disturbed by fictional scenarios that may have some relation, in fact, in this case, a lot of relation to things that are going on currently, then please, you know, go make a cup of coffee, watch a bit of television, listen to one of my old podcasts, and I totally understand why you may not want to hear the next bit.
But for me, and maybe for you too, I'm going to find it incredibly enthralling.
The book is called Lockdown, a word, Peter, that most of us only really associated with prison dramas until very recently.
That's a fact, isn't it?
Yes, I suppose it is.
But if you look back at what people talk about when they're talking about how to deal with a virus, lockdown is the term they use.
Of course, it's not lockdown in France here.
It's confinémon.
Confinement.
Well, that's for that's a lot.
Like a lot of things in French, that's a much nicer word.
Well, yes, except that you're confined.
I mean, confinement would be like being in prison as well, wouldn't it?
That's true.
I'm starting to see you as a sort of Count of Monte Cristo.
Okay, just to give my listener a flavor of how this book runs, and it's a night I had to do, and I always hate having to do this, I had to do a speed read on it.
So I want to go back to it probably over the next weekend, if I get time or during this next coming week, so I can read all the words properly.
But, you know, nice piece of writing.
But just to give my listener an idea of the flavor of what London is like in the midst of this, I recorded sort of audiobook style.
Well, you know, pound shop audiobook style.
A little bit of a reading from the book here.
So this is what, this is the principal character, Detective Inspector Jack McNeill, who is central to the murder investigation that runs, weaves itself through this piece.
Let's just have a listen to him and his journey into London on a working day.
As always, his route into the city was determined by the army checkpoints.
Certain areas were simply off-limits, even to him.
There were demarcation lines that would require special permission to cross.
He drove south to Pentonville, turning west along Pentonville Road into Euston Road.
It was nearly 7.45, and the air was suffused with a grey light that forced its way through low, pewtery cloud that seemed to graze the tops of distant skyscrapers.
In another life, taxis and buses and commuter traffic would have choked the city's arteries like cholesterol.
McNeil still couldn't get used to the empty streets.
There was a chilling quiet in this early morning light.
He passed the occasional troop carrier, soldiers with gas masks and goggles staring from beneath khaki canvas covers, like faceless troopers from a Star Wars movie, nursing rifles that they'd been forced all too frequently to use.
Now that there was daylight, there was a limited traffic of private and commercial vehicles with the requisite clearance to move around designated areas of the city, tracked by cameras and satellite.
Controls were most stringent around the city center, where much of the looting had taken place.
The government had used the old congestion charging infrastructure to monitor and control all vehicles moving in and out of the area.
McNeil cruised along its northern limit, passing a deserted Euston station, before turning south into Tottenham Court Road, where a camera recorded his number plate and fed it directly into the central computer.
Without clearance, he could expect to be stopped within minutes.
Well, I hope you'll forgive me, Peter, for slaughtering your work there, but I just wanted to try and give a bit of a flavor.
Very well read.
Well, no, I loved it.
We have to admit, though, and we have to say, that it has the flavour of where we're at at the moment, but it's much more extreme.
It is, yes, because the death rate is much higher.
It has gone on for much longer.
Social unrest has broken out with looting and various law breaches.
And they've called in the army to police that and impose a nighttime curfew.
I mean, that's not so far-fetched.
I mean, if you even look at what's happening now in areas of southern Italy where exactly that is taking place, where social unrest is getting quite to be a problem.
And, you know, there's looting, there's breaking into supermarkets.
People get hungry, you know, if they have no money and they can't buy food and they can't get to food, then, you know, they start taking extreme measures.
But from that point of view, we have to say that it's all been very well handled.
The army's been used for the distribution of PPE equipment to hospitals and that sort of thing.
And the British people are doing their very best in the lockdown to obey the instructions that they've been given.
And really, the only things that we've been reading about here are maybe people sunbathing, which is a stupid thing to do at close proximity to each other, and various other acts of idiocy, which are very much in the minority.
But it is the flavor of the thing and the fact that I suppose the things that you talk about, they're not transpiring.
We have to say again, this is a work of fiction if you're just tuning into it.
But the plans that you read about, presumably, because the book talks about these things, the plans that you read about allowed for all of those things that you talk about.
That's right, yes.
And also, if you go wider afield, I mean, the example of what the Chinese did during the SARS outbreak in 2002, the building of emergency hospitals in a matter of like one week or two weeks.
We are now replicating that during this current crisis, the use of these conference centers for overspill.
Well, in the book, I used what was then called the Millennium Dome, now the O2 Arena.
And of course, we have to say that, and I remember this because I was on the air in London, the only stories at the time you wrote the book to do with the Millennium Dome were the stories about what a turkey the place was and what we were going to do with it in the future.
You couldn't have known, of course, that it would be the great success as the O2 Arena that it is now.
I remember actually going to the dome just before it was opened and interviewing P.Y. Gerbot, the Frenchman they brought in to run it.
And they also brought Michael Grade in, you know, famous entertainment television executive.
They brought him in and I spoke with him and they had great hopes for it.
Of course, for years, it was a turkey, but in your book, it's used as a center for as a massive hospital, effectively.
That's right, yeah.
And for part of my research for the book, I came to London and I visited all the locations I intended to use just to get the kind of detail and the feel and the atmosphere right.
I'm one of those writers, I can't write about places I haven't been to.
I like to smell it and feel it and really get a sense of the place.
And at that time, as you say, the Millennium Dome was regarded as being a bit of a turkey, a very expensive kind of folly.
And it wasn't much in use.
And when I went out to have a look at it, the whole area around it seemed semi-derelict.
It was quite depressing, actually.
And of course, the other side of the river, you had the Isle of Dogs, which also features in the book.
And that part of the story developed from what I knew had happened in the United States, where towns and villages posted people with guns on roads in and out to stop any people approaching, which is something that I do in the book with the Isle of Dogs, which has basically sealed itself off.
And in your book, Battersea Power Station, now again, Battersea Power Station, we didn't know what to do with it in 2005.
I remember doing a radio show from there.
An astonishing building, of course, but a great big gutted shell.
Well, of course, now it's becoming residential and it's, you know, a lot of investors have bought property in that area.
But in the book, they actually deploy it as, and we have to say this is a work of fiction.
This is not now, but it was deployed as a crematorium.
Yes, that kind of mass crematorium because the standard crematorium and the city simply couldn't handle the numbers.
And as you say, at that time, people didn't know what to do with it.
There were various suggestions and various plans, but it was lying empty and semi-derelict.
And again, I went to have a look at it in some detail for the book.
I mean, it's interesting to see how things have changed over the years.
And, you know, if I were writing the book now, then obviously these were locations that I wouldn't necessarily use.
I mean, it is all an amplification.
I was going to say exaggeration, but that's a word that can be taken wrongly.
It's an amplification of the reality that we're now looking at.
So it's a ramped up version.
In your book, for example, we know that we had Boris Johnson who thankfully was treated wonderfully, as he said, by the NHS, which he undoubtedly was, and came through it and is now recuperating and now realizing that it takes a lot of recuperation.
I think they say for every day that you have, you're in hospital, you need a week of recuperation.
I think that may be wrong.
So he came through it, and we're all thankful for that.
But in your book, the Prime Minister dies, infected by his own children, I think.
That's correct.
Yeah.
And it's right in the first chapter.
And what was I thought was very spooky was, I mean, just literally within a day or two of the e-book being published, Boris was rushed into hospital.
And the next thing he's in the ICU.
And I knew that in the opening chapter of my book, the Prime Minister had died.
And it seemed extraordinary to me that it felt like it was all coming true.
I'm no great fan of Boris Johnson, but I'd absolutely wish him no harm whatsoever.
And I'm very pleased that he made the recovery that he did.
But for a time, it looked very scary.
And I was thinking, oh my gosh, people are going to blame me for this.
You know, it's as if by having written it, I made it happen.
Fortunately, it didn't, which is great.
But the other coincidence here is that Boris was treated in the same hospital that the Prime Minister dies in in the book, St. Thomas Hospital.
Yes, I thought that was astonishing, really.
And I'm guessing that nobody else, I haven't seen anything else like this.
Nobody else had written anything like this.
But this book that was so prophetic, well, now, with the benefit of hindsight, so prophetic about aspects of where we're at, this book stayed in a drawer for 15 years.
Literally, I mean, I've written, well, probably about 15 books since then.
So while I recalled that I had written it, the detail of it escaped me.
And I had kind of long ago written it off as something that would never see the light of day.
And even when, you know, our pandemic started for real, I didn't make the connection.
Strange as it may seem, I didn't make that connection.
I was too busy looking at the news and following what was happening and thinking, oh my God, this is awful.
How's it going to affect me and my family and my friends and the world at large?
Are things ever going to be the same again?
And it was actually somebody on my Twitter timeline who said, Peter, why don't you, during this lockdown period when you've got all this time to write, why don't you come up with a thriller set against the background of the coronavirus?
And it was a kind of little light bulb moment for me.
I already did.
Yeah, exactly.
And I thought, I have to dig this out and have a look at it.
And so I did.
I never threw anything away.
I got the manuscript out and I reread it.
And it was definitely here standing up on the back of the neck time as I read, particularly those opening passages.
And it was because it was exactly, back then I had described exactly what's happening now.
And it was, I don't know, I was astonished and quite spooked by it.
But I still didn't know what to do about it.
I still wasn't thinking about publication at that point.
Did you have any misgivings at Any point?
Did you think perhaps in many ways this is the right time to publish, and in some ways, it isn't?
Well, I understand that, yes.
Obviously, there are people who are going through horrible things just now, terrible family losses and losses of loved ones and friends who wouldn't want to read this in a million years.
And I absolutely wouldn't blame them.
But that did seem, because I test the water on my, particularly on my Facebook page, where there are many, many thousands of readers follow me.
And I kind of tested the water on this, and the enthusiastic response for it was huge.
And I mentioned it really in passing to my editor at my publisher, Quercus.
And I couldn't see him, obviously, but I think he metaphorically fell off his chair at the idea that I had a manuscript like this sitting gathering dust in a bottom drawer.
And he asked to see it, and I sent it to him.
And he read it literally overnight.
And there was an email waiting for me when I woke up in the morning.
And he said, Peter, this book is brilliant.
We have to publish it now.
And well, and we did.
But I mean, we're all in extraordinary circumstances just now.
And the publishing industry is in real trouble because, you know, they work on fine margins and cash flow is vitally important.
And they rely on a conveyor belt of publication and sales to keep them afloat.
And of course, all new publications have been postponed indefinitely.
Money's not coming in.
People are being laid off.
People are being furloughed.
Publishing industry is in real crisis.
As far as I'm concerned, this fits the spirit of the time.
And listen, what I thought when I did my speed read, and I will read it properly, but I actually got comfort from it because it's bad now, but it's not that bad.
It's not as bad as it is in your book.
So I actually drew a kind of strange and perverse comfort from it.
Do you know, it's strange that you use the word comfort.
Let me just read you a quote, because I've had, I mean, I've been snowed under with responses to the book and 99% positive.
But here's one that really struck a chord with me.
Somebody wrote saying, great read.
So comforting at this time in a weird way.
I can see why it was deemed unrealistic in 2005, too apocalyptic, but so 2020.
Now, you notice I've deliberately not unveiled the details of the murder mystery.
We'll let readers go for that.
I was interested in the process, and that's why we're talking now.
We're coming to the end of it, sadly, Peter.
I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation.
We have to say, before anybody sends me an email saying this man is profiting from a crisis, you're not.
No, I mean, I don't want to profit from anybody's misfortune or misery in any way, shape or form.
I mean, I wrote this book 15 years ago, and the chances are it would have remained unpublished forever if this hadn't arisen.
So I have pledged my entire advance on the book to charities fighting on the front line against the coronavirus.
Well, that's excellent.
And if people want to read about it, you've got a very good website.
Do you want to give me the address?
It's petermay.co.uk.
Peter, thank you very much for that.
What are you working on next, by the way?
Well, I was about to head off to the Arctic Circle to do the research on my next book, but that's all been cancelled.
So I'm working on something closer to home now.
All right.
Well, I'm going to check out whatever that might be.
I'm going to keep checking your website.
I've really enjoyed this conversation.
It's fascinating to plumb these depths and explore these things.
Peter May, thank you very much.
Give my love to Toulouse when you next see it.
I will do her.
Thank you.
Peter May, and we have to stress, of course, it is a work of fiction, but aspects of it are remarkable in the light of what is going on now.
And like I said in the conversation, I find it kind of comforting that things are difficult for so many of us now, for all of us, but they're not as difficult and not as bad as the situation unfurled in the book lockdown, which I definitely recommend to you.
And fair play to Peter for donating money from this book to charity.
I think that's a great thing from the advance.
So I'm very keen to see what he comes up with next.
As I always say here, and it remains true, more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay home, stay calm.
And above all, please, wherever in the world you are, stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection