WAKE UP CALL IN THE CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS

Thriller writer Michael Cordy's brilliant old-fashioned disaster novel features that most modern villain: global warming. But he reveals the spark of the idea came from a terrifying real-life disorder affecting his young daughter

- By Martin Phillips

MOMENTS of horror from your past can mentally scar many people — but not bestselling novelist Michael Cordy. To him, such traumas have the potential to inspire his next high-octane, high-concept thriller.

The author — four of whose books have now been sold to Hollywood - remembers a time as a child, growing up in Uganda at the height of Idi Amin's terrifying repression, when the family was heading home and their driver warned him, “Don’t look to your left!”

“Well, of course,” Michael recalls, “being a child, what do you do? So I looked to my left.

“We were on our way back to Jinja, near to the Speke Monument which marks the source of the Nile. Along the banks of Lake Victoria there were crocodiles and what the soldiers were doing was shooting people dead and pushing them into the water.

“It was at a time when our next door neighbour had just vanished but, as a child, I couldn’t understand it.”

His storytelling since, he says, has always been his way of making sense of the world.

“I know someone who has OCD and he is constantly beset with horrible thoughts of what might happen, which is not nice for him, but I told him, 'I make a living out of that!'

“Horrible thoughts are just thoughts. They have no morality. We are judged by what we do, not what we think.

“I relish the worst possible things and look into the darkness and then write about it and find some positive meaning in it.”