US TOUR 2007, DAY TWENTY-TWO:

As we came over the hilltop, the bay opened out before us, and there, shimmering in the dusky pink evening haze, was the city of San Francisco clinging to steeply rising hills above the water. In the far distance we could just make out the distinctive rise and fall of the Golden Gate Bridge.

I had been to this city before, but never seen it from here.

It is truly spectacular.

By the time we were crossing the Bay Bridge, the lights were on, redifining the city in the fading light, reflecting it in still dark waters. We skimmed past its very edge, skyscrapers towering above us before we passed on through the hills towards San Jose. By the time we got to San Mateo it was dark. The main street was defined by Japanese restaurants and shops selling oriental goods. The journey from Sacramento had taken nearly two-and-a-half hours in rush-hour traffic. But we sailed through it in our Toyota Prius, the pride and joy of Susie's business partner, Eric Jungemann, who had generously offered to drive us there and back.

Having disparagingly described Eric's precious Prius as a "potato car", Susie sat in the back seat with her computer on her lap writing and re-writing software for the entire journey, while the rest of us sang Beatles songs along to a CD.

Ed Kaufman's bookstore, M is for Mystery, is a fine shop, with well-stocked shelves, and he has more than 4000 subscribers to his newsletter. He sells books all around the world, and has been very supportive of my work.

We had a small, but enthusiastic crowd, and I had the chance to try out my talk for the first time. There were a few rough edges, and I need to polish up the end a bit, but it went down well enough. As usual I signed the huge stacks of my books that Ed had bought in and will hand-sell, then we headed off into the night for sushi (well, what else?) before hitting the road for home.

A red tide of tail lights on a ribbon of black highway that wound its way back through hills that looked as if they had been draped with pearl necklaces of light. The Bay Area is so densely populated, huge blazing swathes of connurbation huddled around the water's edge.

Then San Francisco rose up around us once more before the box girders of the Bay Bridge sent it shuttering off into the night behind us. Tomorrow we will be back, but this time to head right into the heart of the city itself.

I feel a long way from home, but at the same time privileged to be here. And there is so much more still to come.

Oh... and thanks, Eric, for helping us contribute in our own small way to the fight against climate change with our zero emissions journey there and back.

Long live the Potato Car!

US TOUR 2007, DAY TWENTY-ONE:

It was the best of days and the worst of days.

Tipping out of a hotel room at midday, we made our way - via a quick lunch in a Greek restaurant - to the studios of Capital Public Radio in Sacramento to be interviewed live for the "Insight" programme hosted by Scots exile Jeffrey Callison.

Sitting in the green room, nervously clutching the extract from "Extraordinary People" that I was to read during the interview, I got distracted listening to the guest ahead of me. Her name was Kim Phuc. You might never have heard of her, but you've almost certainly seen her. She was the little girl on fire in the photograph taken during the Vietnam war following a napalm attack. She was running down the road towards the camera, arms raised, trying to escape the fire and the pain.

Miraculously she survived, but only because the man who took the photograph, Nick Ut, got her to a hospital. She had burns across nearly two thirds of her body, had something like seventeen operations, and was in hospital for a year-and-a-half. She was nine years old when it happened. The photographer now lives in Los Angeles, and they still keep in touch, talking by phone at least once a week.

When the Vietnamese government discovered some years later that the girl in the photograph was still alive, they attempted to exploit her for propaganda purposes, interrupting her medical studies at home to send her to Cuba to train in languages. There, she met her future husband - also a Vietnamese. They were told that they had to honeymoon in Moscow, but when the plane stopped to refuel in Canada, they took their chance to seek political asylum.

She has lived there, ever since, raising children, and only recently taking them back to Vietnam to visit the spot where she was pictured in flames.

As I sat listening, she recounted the story of her meeting with the man who had coordinated that napalm bombing mission in 1972. He asked if she could ever forgive him, and without hesitation she told him she had already done so.

She now runs an organisation that works to help children who are the victims of war.

There was something extraordinarily moving in her simple articulatation of the dreadful pain she suffered, and the difficult journey of her life from that moment to this. Her courage and suffering reduced my nerves at speaking on live radio to something considerably less than inconsequential.

So it was without fear that I read my piece and did my interview, reducing Jeffrey to open-mouthed amazement at the story of my pathology adviser, Dr. Steve Campman, and the French woman whose life he saved - all because of a scene I had written in "The Firemaker".

Off then, to a wine bar in downtown Sacramento called 58 degrees to discuss the promotion next year of the follow-up book to "Extraordinary People", which is set amongst the vineyards of southwest France. The book is already written, and plans for a uniquely different tour to promote it are fermenting nicely. And just to keep our discussions well lubricated we had a glass or three of excellent wine to wash down the words.

The book event at the Avid Reader in Davis that night was seriously quiet. The town was deserted. Monday evening, the day after the Super Bowl... maybe not the best time for a talk on mystery books set in France and China.

So we turned it into a drop-in signing, and I signed all the copies of "Extraordinary People", "The Fourth Sacrifice" and "The Firemaker" that the store had got in stock for the event. A signed book is a sold book, so all in all, we did not too badly.

And, you know, each time I think of that little girl, arms outstretched, running down the road, it puts all my troubles, whatever they might be, into their proper perspective.

(Copyright, Nick Ut/Associated Press)

US TOUR 2007, DAY TWENTY:

Just a boring old travel day. Actually, a really quiet travel day. Because this is the day when America comes to a full stop.

IT'S SUPERBOWL!!

Yes, the day that Janet Jackson bared a nipple for all of half a second and shocked a nation. Well, having taken elaborate safeguards to ensure that nothing so obscene should ever be seen again in this country that hosts the world's biggest porn industry, Americans were settling down again to watch a game between a team from Chicago (the Bears), and a team from (I think) Indianapolis. Why anyone else in the country would give a damn who wins beats me.

In an FA Cup final between, say, Leicester and Coventry, no one outside of those two sets of supporters (except for a few diehard soccer fans) would even bother to watch the game.

It is a phenomenon unique to the US. Some poor fellow authors at Left Coast Crime were scheduled to sign books at the Seattle Mystery Bookshop this afternoon. By kick-off time, it was expected that the town would be deserted and that beyond that time no one would turn up at the store. I'm glad I did my signing yesterday, when the store was jam-packed.

Even on the ride out to the airport it was apparent that the streets were emptying. The airport itself was a bit like a ghost town, and the few people sitting at gates waiting for their flights were all glued to TV sets showing the game.

With four hours to wait, I'm actually sitting here writing this to kill the time.

In a few hours I will meet up again with La Patronne and Susie at Sacramento and the tour will begin in earnest - an hour-long interview on Sacramento public radio tomorrow afternoon, followed by a talk and signing at the Avid Reader bookstore in Davis. Then on Tuesday it's San Mateo, and on Wednesday San Francisco. And so on...

From a nearby TV the cheers of the crowd are ringing in my ears.

As a famous American poet once wrote: The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep!


A couple of Seattle streets buskers (no, NOT Bill and Tanya!)...

PS: For those following the blog, it wasn't Bill at the Seattle Opera.

US TOUR 2007, DAY NINETEEN:

Thirty years ago I was best man at the wedding of Bill and Tanya Hill at Martha Street registry office in Glasgow.

It is more than twenty years since I last set eyes on them.

This morning we met again, the three of us, in a hotel lobby in Seattle, and it was as if all the years in between had never been. We went upstairs to the cafe and shared brunch. We talked for three hours, built fragile bridges that spanned the time in between, and saw in one another the people we had once been - and still are.

But we have come such a long way, all of us, since those early days when Bill and I first met as cub reporters on a local daily newspaper in the provincial Scottish town of Paisley. We moved on then to Scotland's top broadsheet, "The Scotsman", where we sat across a desk from one another for nearly five years.

But we shared so much more than a job. We spent many hours together writing and playing and recording music, talking, dreaming - knowing that the future must hold more than the present. But neither of us could have dreamt then where it would take us, and that all these years later we would be grinning at one another like idiots across a cafe table in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

Bill's story is one of extraordinary achievement against the odds. Born and brought up in a working class housing project in the notorious east-end of Glasgow, his father died when he was just fourteen, and he took on the mantle of man of the house, and breadwinner.

But Bill wasn't just a hard worker. He was smart. Really smart. He sat an exam and won a scholarship to one of Glasgow's top private boys' schools, Alan Glen's, where he excelled academically. But he was also a rebel, and rejected the conventional academic route through university, finally to carve out a niche for himself as a journalist. But with his long hair and thick, bushy beard, and his restless talent, he pushed at the boundaries of accepted convention. Spotted once by a rival newspaper busking in Buchanan Street in Glasgow on a Saturday afternoon, he was hauled over the coals by the editor of "The Scotlsman" after a story appeared in the gossip column of a Sunday tabloid, suggesting that "Scotsman" reporters were paid so poorly they had to go busking to make ends meet.

Of such things are legends made.

I left newspapers in 1979 to pursue a career as a writer, and over the next few years we lost touch. On a return visit one day to "The Scotsman", I learned that Bill had left to join a software company in Edinburgh. Seismic shift! And it wasn't until about five years ago that I discovered that Bill had gone on to distinguish himself in the field, co-inventing ClearType - a revolutionary way of presenting type on computer screens.

Head-hunted by Microsoft here in Seattle, Bill went through a rigorous interview process - not dissimilar to the selection procedure employed by the Ecole Nationale d'Adminstration (ENA) in France. Offered a job and welcomed aboard a company that was shooting for the stars (and getting there), he found that while his IQ of nearly 160 had usually made him the brightest guy in any gathering, he was now - in his own words - the dumbest guy in the room.

Which is typically self-effacing and, of course, belies the fact that he went on to become one of the brightest stars in the Microsoft constellation - finding himself addressing audiences of 3000 people and sharing the stage with one of the world's richest and best-known men, Bill Gates. Wearing his kilt, naturally (Bill H, not Bill G).

Bill's new life was telegraphed to him in a dream, where he saw wolves appearing through a breach in thick clouds, beyond which he caught sight of a star-studded sky. Whereupon he, himself, turned into a wolf and found himself running with other wolves through the woods.

He now lives in those wild woods outside Seattle, absorbing the wisdom of native Americans learning how to track and follow the very wolves he had once joined in his dreams. His wife, Tanya, has reflected those dreams in a wonderfully evocative series of paintings, and Bill returned to his musical roots to write and record an album of songs that tell the story.

They have a house in Hawaii, right down on the beach. At nearly fifty-eight Bill is learning to surf. He faces life fearlessly following a stroke ten years ago that nearly robbed him of his life (it was a stroke that killed his father, aged 44). "It made me not afraid any more," he told me. "To face life, to express myself, to stand up in front of three thousand people... I'm glad now that it happened."

He grinned at me. "Sometimes I find it hard to believe I'm here in Seattle, living this life, that I've come this far, by this route.. wee Willie Hill fae Barlanark."

It was an emotional reunion. And when, finally, we parted, we hugged, and our lives went off again on their separate and very different ways. And I found it hard to believe, and almost as hard to accept, that we should meet so briefly after all this time, and might never meet again.

Isn't life strange?

*******************************************

Following my reunion with the Hills I went to sign books for the good folk of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, and had the privilege of meeting the store's founder, Bill Farley...

US TOUR 2007, DAY EIGHTEEN:

This is one of these days where I have no idea where to begin.

Okay, so let's start with the people. Who did I meet? A half-Japanese female fan who had introduced me at Bouchercon in Chicago to Qiao Xialong.

She joined me in the lobby of the conference hotel while I was waiting to meet English author David Hewson. And what did she do? She introduced me to another two authors. It may be her gift.

Now, this is where it gets weird. The first writer lived in Hong Kong for several years, working as a financial journalist, before writing a book based on the white slave trade between Russian and Asia (a true story he had stumbled on as a journalist). Of course, he's an Eric. Eric Stone. A former radical activist turned capitalist who lives now in LA. And that book? "The Living Room of the Dead". One to read, I think.

And even weirder. A guy called Charles Benoit, a writer of books set in exotic locations with titles like "The Money Box" and "Veterans Day Memo". But that's not what's weird. What's really spooky is that he lives in Rochester, New York - where my brother-in-law (Le Beau Frere) lives. To be more accurate, Le Beau Frere lives in Fairport, where his children went to school, where his wife worked, and for whom he annually builds the sets for the school play.

And guess what? Charles Benoit's wife is a teacher at the same Fairport school!

Okay, so I never did make that rendezvous with David Hewson. I had a panel at 1pm and made my way to the Green Room to meet my fellow panellists. En route, I paused in the hallway to phone a lady called Kat Richardson to book a place at that night's special tour of "underground" Seattle (more of that later). I got her messaging service and left a message.

In the green room, I was gazing from the window when my cellphone rang. I answered it and a woman's voice asked, "Peter May?"

"Yes," I told her.

There was an odd hiatus, and then she said, "I'm standing right behind you." I turned around and there she was. She hung up the phone. "I'm Kat Richardson," she said. "I had no idea you were in the same room."

Anyway, I got my place booked for the night tour of underground Seattle.

Then there was the panel, which was extremely well moderated by Canadian writer Anthony Bidulka, who writes about gay detective, Russell Quant, bringing a whole new meaning to the term "private dick". My fellow panellists were Jon Talton from Phoenix (who shares both my US publishers and editors), Jo Dereske, who has written a very large number of books featuring her heroine Miss Zukas, and Pamela Samuels Young, a lady lawyer at Toyota who has created a highly successful fictitious lady lawyer called Vernetta Henderson.

We had about sixty people in the room, and a lively discourse that flew by. They should all be like that!

Then there was the St. Martin's Press cocktail party in a nearby hotel. We were invited by "Keith, Ruth and Andy". I have no idea who Keith and Andy are, and I didn't catch a single glimpse of Ruth - who is my editor. There was no one at the door to say "hi, what would you like to drink?" In fact, there was nobody I knew at all. So I sat in a corner, ordered a whisky, and sipped quietly watching newcomers arrive and stand around awkwardly wondering what they were doing there. Which would have been me if I hadn't found a seat and a drink. Last time I was at a St. Martin's party I got rescued by writer Carl Brookins. Sadly Carl wasn't there to do the honours this time.

I drank up and beat a hasty retreat to the official Left Coast Crime reception where I finally hooked up with David Hewson. But he was heading off to dinner somewhere, and I had an appointment with underground Seattle.

So I had another drink and embarked on the knee-destroying walk down the hill to Pioneer Square, and a tour of underground sidewalks and long-abandoned streets that fester in the dark beneath the modern city. It seems that after the great fire of 1889 they re-built Seattle in the most bizarre and haphazard fashion, with streets walled in and raised in level by filling the space between the walls with rubble from the cliffs above. Unfortunately, the sidewalks and buildings were re-built at the original levels, so that you had to climb ladders from the sidewalk to cross the road, and then climb down ladders to the sidewalk on the other side. Each street was built in this way, one above the other, up and down the side of what was left of the cliffs. Virtual terraces.

After seventeen people died by falling from the roads on to the sidewalks, they put in steel beams and built brick arches between them, to raise the level of the sidewalks to the same height as the roads. As a result, they created a network of underground tunnels beneath that became infested by rats and incubated the bubonic plague. These were declared a health hazard a hundred years ago. So, of course, today, there are guided tours for stupid tourists - of whom, last night, I was one.

It wasn't quite in the same class as the catacombs of Paris, or the Underground City in Beijing, but an interesting end to the day, nonetheless.


Michelle of the Heirloom online bookstore arrived with a suitcase of books for me to sign...


Seattle as viewed from my hotel...

US TOUR 2007, DAY SEVENTEEN:

Across a shimmer of black water, the lights of Seattle pricked a night sky turned to mother of pearl by a full moon.

We were cruising in the dark along the far shore of the suburb of Magnolia, myself and three nice people from California and Indiana. We were in a taxi following convoluted instructions to the home of the Karps, a delightful and eccentric couple who were hosting a party for my publisher, Poisoned Pen Press. Larry Karp is another of their authors, writer of the well-received "The Ragtime Kid".

Life tips you sometimes into some strange places. The home of the Karps is one of them. I should have known when I saw their name painted on the side of the house - The Karps - a painting of a carp beneath it.

Then it was like walking into a museum. A fantasy time-warp of antiques - every available shelf and laying space taken up by literally thousands of collectibles: toys, hedgehogs, wedgewood china, music boxes - large and small. My immediate response was, my God, how do they dust all these? Someone from Arizona, read my mind and said, 'Good job they don't live in the desert. Dust accumulates in drifts by the day.'

Posters and paintings stared at me from out of a distant past.

Windows looked out across the water, unparallelled views towards the city, and the snow-capped mountains beyond.

Two hundred year-old music boxes, engineered with extraordinary precision, rang out across a room cluttered with historical artefacts. I chatted to my publisher, Barbara Peters, and the author with whom I will be appearing jointly at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, in three weeks, Mary Anna Evans, writer of the Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries.

This was all just a little unreal. The temperature had fallen nearly thirty degrees (fahrenheit) since I waved goodbye to La Patronne in Southern California earlier that morning - like flying back into winter. But at least the sun had been shining, a dazzle of snow on the mountains, the Pacific northwest a hard steel blue.

From the Renaissance Hotel, perched atop the highest hill in the city, I had made my way down to the Pike Street fish market to banish hunger in a tiny eatery that serves the best clam chowder in the world. A large helping of smoked salmon chowder with sourdough bread did the trick. Then a coffee. I retraced my steps and stopped at one of the half dozen Starbucks I had passed en route. This was, after all, the home of the famous coffee shop chain.

I was struck again, by the similarity of this city, to my home town of Glasgow, and thought of the meeting I had set up for Saturday morning with a friend I hadn't seen in twenty years.



Bill Hill and I were journalists together in Glasgow in the seventies, and we wrote and played music together. But then I went into television. He went into software development. We lost touch. Years later I found out he had been headhunted by Microsoft and now heads up one of their major software research divisions.

Like myself, he is a man who likes to wear the kilt.

Which brings me back to Magnolia, and the PPP reception at the Karp's. In conversation with my hostess, Myra, she mentioned that every time they went to the opera in Seattle they were struck by the sight of a man who always wore the kilt.

'Does he have a big beard?' I asked.

She seemed surprised. 'Yes, he does.'

And does he have dark hair pulled back in a pony tail?

Her eyebrows shot up. 'Well, yes.'

'Then I think, perhaps, you are talking about my old pal, Bill Hill.'

'What an extraordinarily small world,' she said.

I'll find out on Saturday.

US TOUR 2007, DAY TWELVE:

It was an act of sheer insanity! My last free Saturday spent cooped up in a car on an eight-hour round trip into the rural heartland of Central California. In my kilt!

I have to ask... what in God's name were we thinking about? Well, I'll tell you. We were thinking about our roots, and our culture, and a man who expressed it all better than anyone else before or since - the Scottish national bard, Robert Burns.

Yes, we travelled three hundred miles through torrential rain to attend a Burns Supper!

How crazy is that?

Well, it was the strangest experience. The only time in America that I didn't feel conspicuous in a kilt. It was magic. One hundred and eighty people with claims to Scottish origin - some with such typically Scottish names as Gutierrez and Pazeian - turned out to pay their respects to the bard, to eat haggis, and have a good time.

There were kilts of all shapes and sizes - draped on men all shapes and sizes. There was a pipe band who marched and puffed and blew, exertion turning cheeks that typically Scottish skin hue of pink-verging-on puce. There were lassies who danced the Highland Fling around crossed swords on the floor. There was the piping in of the haggis, followed by a lively rendition of Burns's ode to that "chieftan o' the puddin' race", and the stabbing of the beast to release its "reeking" vapours.

It was very emotional, almost like being at home - until it was announced to the assembled that there were three REAL Scots in the room (moi, la Patronne and le Beau Frere) who had driven all the way from up Newport Beach. And we had to stand up - to thunderous applause - our faces turning rouge. And those happy Californians knew for certain that their ancestors truly were insane.

What would be even more true to say was that we received the warmest of all possible welcomes from the absolutely delightful folk of the Scottish Society of Central California in this cowboy town called Fresno http://www.scottishsociety.org.

We ate prime rib, and mashed tatties, and neeps, and, of course, haggis - the best any of us had had since leaving Scotland. We listened to speaker after speaker. And then, the highlight of the night. Ed Miller. A Scotsman from Edinburgh, now living in Austin, Texas, who accompanied himself on guitar to sing the songs of home http://www.songsofscotland.com. Not just songs written by Burns, but a whole spectrum of Scottish folk songs that brought long-forgotten words back to mind, and tears to the eye. There's nothing more maudlin' than a Scot a long way from home - "I'm no' awa' tae bide awa', I'll aye come back tae see ye."


He was, too, very funny, with that characteristic self-mocking Scottish wit, and a Burnsian belief in the common man. He told the story of the ceremony where he took American citizenship. There were, he said, only a handful of Europeans. By far the majority were Mexican. However, the three people chosen to say something were all English speakers, which he felt was not a true reflection of those who were there. He chose not to speak, but to sing. "A man's a man for a' that" - one of those seminal Burns songs that made him so popular amongst 20th century socialists. And to correct the imbalance, he sang the last verse in Spanish.

The spell was broken as we left the hall and ran through a downpour to find our dripping vehicle in the parking lot. When began the long drive back through the night, clouds bursting all around us, roads turning to rivers, and visibility reduced to a few metres...

...arriving back at Newport Beach at 2am to find that not a drop of rain had fallen.

And with the moon rising in a clear and starry sky, reflected in the still expanse of the Pacific Ocean, we had to wonder if somehow we had just stumbled back out of the mists of Brigadoon.

US TOUR 2007, DAY ELEVEN:

Postscript to yesterday's blog...

GOOD JOB, STANLEY!

TOUR 2007, DAY TEN:

After the abscessed tooth and the burst water main, the final, disastrous indignity!

About three weeks ago, I had a root canal done on one of my front teeth, after which my French dentist told me that the tooth was very fragile, and that I should take great care when biting into stuff.

Well, I did.

But the damn thing went and broke on me anyway - last night, at the end of a great meal. And I don't even recall biting down on anything. But suddenly there it was, rattling about in my mouth - my front tooth.

And there am I, with twenty public speaking engagements over the next six weeks, looking like someone who escaped from a Dickens novel. A great testament to French and Scottish dentistry - or maybe just my crumbly teeth!

Oh, shit!

Well, Susie got me an appointment today with Stanley - he and I are getting to know one another too well. So, we'll see what the dashing dentist of Newport Beach can do to restore my good looks.

Okay, I can hear you say it already. What good looks?

Judging by the picture below, he's got a helluva job on his hands!

US TOUR 2007, DAY NINE:

We were supposed to be out on the ocean watching for the spouts of whales as they headed south from Alaska. Instead, workmen from across the road came rapping on Susie's door to say there was water bubbling out of the ground at the front wall of her house.


We went out to look. Right enough, water was forcing itself up through the flowerbed and gushing chocolate brown across the pavement and along the gutter. A leak in the water main. Susie rushed off to phone the City, whose responsibility it would be to fix it.

I stood in the street watching. And right before my eyes, the ground began to tremble. The earth heaved and puffed and blew. A shrub got pulled up by the roots, before suddenly a powerful jet of water simply exploded out of the ground.

Thar she blows!

It was not the kind of spout we had been anticipating. But the force of it was incredible, exiting the ground at an angle, slamming against the wall of the house, ripping at the gutter, before deflecting twenty feet above the roof, a rainbow forming in sunshine through fine spray.

By now, everyone was out in the street. Neighbours, workmen, passers-by. It was an extraordinary spectacle, and a huge hole had formed in the ground. It took the waterworkers from the City more than half-an-hour to get there. All the while we were praying that the gutter would hold. Because if it gave way, the force of the water would rip up the roof and the damage would be unthinkable.

When finally the City workers arrived they gawped open-mouthed, and then spent the next half-hour trying to find the valve to turn off the water. They were up the street, down the street, round the corner, before finally finding the right one, buried under crap in a building site next door.

We left them to it, and belatedly met up with Pam and Mick who were taking us out whale-spotting on their boat. As we cruised gently out of the harbour towards the ocean, we finally began to relax after the morning's excitement.

Sadly, Susie's geyser was the only one we saw that morning. No whales to be seen. We did, however, spot an enormous elephant seal, and a handful of dolphins who played around our wake for a while, before we returned for a gentle tour of the harbour, drifting past the homes of millionaires while chomping on avocado sandwiches.

By the time we got home, the repair was finished, and the water guys had replaced all the earth that had been washed away. They had cleaned up the road and the pavement, and you'd never have known that anything untoward had happened.


The "Mushroom House", on the market for a cool 75 million dollars...

US TOUR 2007, DAYS THREE TO EIGHT:

What was supposed to be a short respite before the onslaught of the tour proper, has turned somewhat calamitous.

It started, I suppose, the night before we left. A dull ache in a back tooth. It responded painfully to pressure. No time to go to the dentist. A train to catch, then a plane. I thought maybe it was caused by the stress of travelling and might recede.

It didn't.

Gradually, day by day, it got worse, until by the weekend I could barely eat, the pain was so bad. Susie phoned her dentist and he called in a prescription of antibiotic to the local pharmacy. Three days of taking the pills and the pain had started to wane. But I went this morning to see the dentist in person, and an x-ray confirmed worst fears - an abscess. So I spent the next hour in the chair of a charming man - Stanley Armbruster, who had treated me once before, eight years ago - and submitted myself to a serious piece of root canal treatment.

What fun! Not.

The only consolation as I sit here clutching my sore jaw is the sunshine spilling through large windows, and sunlight coruscating across the stainless steel waters of the Pacific. Pain in paradise.

On a lighter note, we went yesterday morning to buy a beach bike as a gift for our host, Susie, so she could accompany us on our ten mile jaunts along the boardwalk to Huntington Beach. We picked out a perfect Newport Beach bike - pink and green, with white trim and a white saddle. She says she's going to have to buy a new outfit to match it.

The guy who sold us the bike was patenting a new way of riding these self-balancing segway machines that turn ordinary mortals into impossible pedestrians on wheels. I'd seen a few folk riding around on them and always wondered how they never fell over. Well, he insisted I find out.

With great trepidation, I climbed on to the footboard of the thing and he strapped my knees to a central pole. It was completely hands-free. Nothing to hold on to. "Normally, it takes me fifteen minutes to train someone on one of these," he said. 'But with this model you just mount and ride." Well, I'd mounted, but I wasn't riding yet. I was waving my hands around like a demented tightrope walker. He sighed patiently. 'Put your arms down."

I did as I was told.

"You lean forward to go forward, lean back to stop. Use your knees to turn left or right."

I managed to turn straight into a wall.

"Have you never been ski-ing?" he asked.

"Nope"

"Snow-boarding? Surfing?"

"Nope.

As I found myself going round in a circle on the same spot I heard the exasperation in his voice. He turned to La Patronne. "He's the only person I've ever come across who has no control of his knees." He looked at me as I swivelled my torso left and right to no effect. "Man, I'd hate to see you on a dance floor."

As the laughter of the watching hordes - La Patronne and Le Beau Frere - subsided, he unstrapped me and showed me how it should be done - whizzing backwards and forwards along the pavement with the greatest of ease. It looked great fun. But somehow I didn't think I would ever master it. Brain-hand coordination doesn't extend beyond the computer keyboard in my case.

Having finally controlled the urge to burst out laughing every five seconds at the memory of my hopeless gyrations, La Patronne confessed, "We might be laughing, but really it's just in relief that we didn't have to do it."

We'll see about that!!

Tomorrow it's off whale-spotting.

The Newport Beach Bike...


Sunset over Catalina...

US TOUR 2007, DAY TWO:

"Excusez-moi, madame!"

I had my back turned to him, so I suppose all he saw was the skirt and the pony tail. But his face, when I turned around, was a picture - of shock and embarrassment. "Madame" turned out to be six feet, two, with a prickly silver beard. For a moment, I guess, he thought I was going to hit him. But when La Patronne burst out laughing and I grinned, his fear gave way to embarrassment.

I had been about to enter one of these airport queueing mazes at the wrong end as we headed towards the security check, and the security guard had made an unfortunate error in identifying my sex.

When I take my kilt with me on transcontinental promotional trips, I never risk leaving it to the vagaries of the baggage handlers. It would, after all, cost nearly a thousand euros to replace. All eight metres of heavy tartan wool. So I wear it for travelling.

It always attracts attention, whether in France or the States. Sometimes, as at the airport, it is the wrong kind. I always get searched. Take off the boots, take off the sporran, take off the belt. And, in this case, twice. Once at security, and once again before being allowed to board the bus that would take us to the plane.

I'm sure I only get asked to take off my boots so that when I crouch to lace them up again, security officers of both sexes are hoping to get a glimpse of what I'm wearing underneath the kilt.

Sometimes the attention it attracts is a little more welcome, as on the plane itself when I was accosted not once, but twice, by pouting stewardesses anxious to talk to the man in the skirt. As I stood mid-aisle exercising to avoid a long haul embolism, a tall, elegant ebony-skinned stewardess approached and leaned close. "Are you Scottish?" she whispered. "Oui," I told her. She giggled. 'Oh, I like it,' she said, and flushed, and hurried quickly away.

La Patronne returned from another adventure at the toilet, to tell me she had overheard two stewardesses excitedly discussing the man in the skirt - "didn't you see him coming on the plane?" - blithely unaware that the woman beside them was his wife.

Then later, when the cabin steward leaned over to tell me that "you are my first Scottish", his colleague - a striking looking stewardess with brilliant red lip gloss - dipped her eyes coyly in my direction and said, "I find eet ve-ery sexee.'

Which was when La Patronne drew the line. "Don't tell him that!" she snapped - the rest left unsaid, but not misunderstood. She's a real spoilsport!

Many hours later, tired and crushed by the coach class experience, we arrived in LA to be met by a seriously unwell Susie, with whom we would be staying at Newport Beach for the next two weeks. Ravaged by a virulent cold virus (what else would a virus be but virulent?) that had reduced her voice to a sound like torn paper, we headed south for a quick meal at her home overlooking Balboa Island, before putting her to bed with a hot toddy. Then falling, ourselves, into bed, to sleep away the effects of the journey, glad to be in southern California, in the sunshine, for a brief oasis of calm before the storm of the tour.

Day dawns over Balboa Island...

US TOUR 2007, DAY ONE:

On the road again!

It hardly seems credible that nearly eighteen months have passed since I was sitting in an Ibis Hotel at Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris writing the first blog of my September 2005 tour of the US to promote "The Firemaker".

Well, here I am again. This time to promote the second tome of the China Thrillers series, "The Fourth Sacrifice", which comes out in two weeks, and the first of my new series set in France, "Extraordinary People", which came out in November to a chorus of fabulous reviews.

All this on top of having just signed a movie option for "The Firemaker", and writing the screenplay treatment jointly with La Patronne - not to mention the terrific sales of the first three China books in French translation, and months of touring bookfairs and bookstores throughout France.

All the more incredible, since just twelve months ago I was sitting without a single English-language publication deal wondering how I was going to pay the bills in 2006. Such is the precarious and uncertain life of the writer.

Ah, well, at least I start off the tour in the company of La Patronne this time. Life with the formidable lady is never dull, especially when travelling. We were barely on the train when she had her first adventure in the toilets. She either gets locked in, locked out, or flooded. This time she had locked herself in, with a mad woman hammering on the door. Apparently the woman had arrived at the toilet before La Patronne, but was unable to open the door - even although it was vacant. She went off to get help. La Patronne arrived and applied a shoulder with her usual delicacy, unceremoniously bursting into the empty cabine. She locked the door and sat down to do what had to be done. At which point the lady who had been unable to open the door returned with a burly gentlemen, who then proceeded to try to force it open. Much to La Patronne's distress.

Finally he gave up and went away, and when La Patronne emerged in a flush of relief, it was to find an elderly French lady glaring at her, no doubt wondering why she had occupied the toilet for so long. Needless to say, La Patronne felt no explanation was necessary, and hurried off to interrupt Cabrel on my iPod with her tales of woe. The moment I saw her red face approaching down the carriage, I knew that there was one. There is never any alternative but to listen and sympathise.

For most of the journey, however, my thoughts were occupied with the third book in the French series. My publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, has dubbed the series "The Enzo Files" - after my cold case-cracking main character, Enzo Macleod. I have just finished the second in the series, working title "The Critic". It is set amongst the vineyards of Gaillac, and I think I have finally sobered up after an intensive period of research. So I was turning my thoughts to the next one - thoughts which are already pretty far advanced. Endless travelling hours provide good down time for letting the mind work around story and plot, and I'm excited enough now to think I might even start it in April after I get back from the States.

Better go now. La Patronne is lying on the bed with her legs in the air, trying to realign her spine after the train journey. I think I might have to thump a few vertibrae back into place.

We fly out first thing tomorrow (Wednesday, January 17th), but I probably won't get the chance to post this until we get to LA (Wi-fi access here is 10 euros for two hours, and I'm too much of a Scot to pay it). By the time I do, there will no doubt be more adventures in toilets to report!

La Patronne demonstrates her cure for a bad back...

PRIZELESS PROSE
It is not often that an author has a book nominated for two prestigious awards at the same time - and then has to decline both before the winner is even announced.

That's what happened to me this month.

A month which began with my appearance, in Paris, at the annual announcement by Elle magazine of the winner of its Grand Prix - a literary prize awarded by eight juries of the magazine's famously discriminating readers. I was there because the first of my China series, "The Firemaker", had been shortlisted for the prize in its French incarnation of "Meurtes à Pékin". It didn't win, but just to have been nominated was a tremendous honour.

A month which saw me zig-zagging across France from book festival to book festival; attending the Paris launch of "L'éventreur de Pékin" ("Chinese Whispers) by the biggest French bookclub, France Loisirs; speaking on panels; performing radio interviews; reading from my book to the accompaniment of a tenor sax; and signing hundreds of copies of "Le Quatrième Sacrifice", the second in the series. All, of course, in French - which I have been studying hard to try to improve.

A month which approaches its conclusion at the end of a gruelling week-long writing course - one of two which La Patronne and I hold every year at the Hotel Victor Hugo in St. Céré, near where we live. It went quickly and well, due in large part to the fine bunch of students who descended on us from all parts of the world for this first of the two courses.

The thousands of kilometers travelled in blistering heat did, however, have some compensations. Like sharing a stand at the Frontignan Polar Noir book festival on the Mediterranean with such luminaries of the crime-writing genre as Elmore Leonard and Larry Beinhart - a couple of seriously nice people. Or sneaking away from signing duties to share a beer or three in a gloomy bar with English crime-writers Graham Hurley, Maxim Jakubowski and Mark Billingham - all of us glued to a giant TV screen as the English soccer side stumbled its way to an early victory at the World Cup in Germany.

There are not, unfortunately, many compensations for striking yourself off the list of nominees for two of the best-known prizes given in the United States to books in the mystery genre - the Barry Awards and the Macavity Awards. But, sadly, that is what I had to do.

"The Firemaker" was nominated for both awards in the category of Best First Novel published in the US in 2005. It WAS the first book I had written since quitting television in the nineties, and it WAS the first book published in the States in fifteen years. But I had previously written four other books, and two of them had been published in America. So my initial euphoria at being nominated for both a Barry and a Macavity was very quick snuffed out. There was no getting away from it. I didn't qualify, and I had to fess up. And so I e-mailed the award organisers to (very reluctantly) rule myself out.

If there were any compensations, they came in the form of the righteous, if regretful, satisfaction I took from knowing I had done the right thing. Then there were the kind words of Macavity organiser, Janet Rudolph, who apologised for the mix-up and consoled me with the comment, "great book, though". And my agent in London, who said, "Still, everyone thinks it's a bloody good book."

Ah, well, onwards and upwards. The proofs of my new book, "Extraordinary People", arrived this week. Published by Poisoned Pen Press, it will be released in the US and the UK at the end of November. Advance reading copies (ARCs) have already provoked enthusiastic responses. "Wonderful," was how one bookseller described it. "I found it hard to put down," said another. Let's hope everyone else feels the same way.

And it would be nice if it were to win future nominations - perhaps in the category of Best Eleventh Novel!

Onstage during a televised debate at Saint-Malo, France

I'm taking a quiet moment to reflect on a turbulent few months. The first of my China Thrillers, published in France as "Meurtres à Pékin", has really taken off.

Selected by the readers of the French magazine "Elle" for their annual Grand Prix, it is this month's (April) Crime Book of the Month. Seven other titles are in the running for the Grand Prix, and the winner will be announced in May. I don't really expect to win it, but just to be selected is a huge honour. It has meant that the book is getting front-of-house promotion in Virgin Megastores throughout France - which can't hurt sales.

I am now receiving invitations from all over the country to appear at Book Fairs and Festivals. One weekend I'm at St. Malo on the English Channel, the next weekend I'm at Frontignan on the Mediterranean. I have a meeting with my readers at FNAC in Toulouse, a jazz dinner organised by a bookstore in Figeac, a signing in Marseilles... I wonder when I'm going to find the time to write.

The Salon du Livres in Paris - the biggest book fair in the country - took place in the middle of March. I was signing on my publisher's stand for two days, and also made a public appearance as part of a forum of four writers being questioned by a journalist - ALL IN FRENCH!!

The second in the China Series has also just been published here - "Le Quatrième Sacrifice" - and at the beginning of June the sixth in the series, "L'Eventreur de Pékin" will be published by the biggest book club in France, France Loisirs. They have four million subscribers! I met two of their editors in Paris - attractive young ladies who wined and dined me in a classy restaurant near the Eiffel Tower. Life could be worse!!

During a month spent in California, in February, my New York publisher St. Martin's Press confirmed that they will take books two and three in the China Series. "The Fourth Sacrifice" will come out in the States on January 7th, 2007, with "The Killing Room" following shortly after.

During my California sojourn another US publisher - Poisoned Pen Press - snapped up the first book in a new series, set here in France. Working with editor/publisher Barbara Peters has been an absolute joy. The first book, "Extraordinary People" will be published in the US and the UK in November, 2006. I have been commissioned to write the second book in the series, and have just returned from a research trip to the undiscovered wine region of Gaillac - about two hours south of where I live.

Having to research wine for a crime thriller is one of life's great bonuses. I hope to have sobered up by next week.

By way of a footnote: when I returned from Gaillac, it was to find an e-mail from my pal, artist Gilbert Raffin, enclosing photographs he took of "Le Quatrième Sacrifice" in the window of one of the most influential bookstores in Paris. By coincidence, right next to it, was a book by a Chinese crime writer called Qiu Xiaolong, whom I met at Bouchercon in Chicago last September.

A double coincidence, really, since Gilbert sent me a photograph of the same window a few months ago, when "Meurtres à Pekin" was prominently displayed - right beside a book written by my old friend, the Chinese crime writer He Jiahong, who lives in Beijing.

It seems I can't help bumping into old friends in shop windows!

Returning this morning from three days of tasting wines in Gaillac, I found an e-mail awaiting me from my incomparable translator, Ariane. She and Gilbert (who designed the French book cover), were in one of the biggest bookstores in Paris yesterday - chez Gibert in the Boulevard Saint-Michel. On the table, on the first floor, prominently displayed amongst the bestselling books, they discovered a pile of copies of "Meurtres à Pékin" snuggling up to some anonymous book called "The Da Vinci Code" by someone called Dan Brown. Who he?

Chez Gibert, Paris

All over. A hundred books sold - or thereabouts. Endless hours of standing smiling at people, engaging them in (French) conversation, hand-selling my books. This is the sharp end of writing that most authors never get to experience. This is hard-selling direct to the public.

This is seeing their noses wrinkle when they read the blurb on the back of the book, or even when they catch a glimpse of the title. There are, clearly, some people for whom "Meurtres à Pékin" is inestimably distasteful.

With graphic descriptions of carbonised corpses on the back cover, I wonder what on earth could have put them off? Ah, well, chaque à son gout.

One simply has to expect that what one writes is not everyone's cup of tea.

To balance that, my publisher, Danielle Dastugue, was delighted with our sales. For an "inconnue" - unknown - in France, it would have been perfectly possible to sell two books or less, she said. We had done well.

The day started off with a change of stands. We were moved to another stand in the foire, judged to be in a better position. The two young girls, and rugby playing student, who had taken the money and popped the books in bags for us all day Saturday, were almost tearful to see us go. Not unhappy, however, to see the back of us, were the man-hater and Mr. Cèpes, who had deigned to turn up for the Sunday session. Our departure meant they got a bigger and better display.

We, however, found ourselves crammed into a breathless space between a purveyor of philosophy and a writer of such titles as "Le Pinkie-Pinkie", whose cover was adorned with the screaming face of a tortured man. Opposite was an emergency exit which, while providing an outlet for people in trouble, also provided an inlet for frequent blasts of icy autumn air. I was glad I had brought my jacket.

What was nice was that both the young girls at our new stand bought and asked me to sign copies of the book, and that the girls from the previous day's stand paid us several visits to check that we were okay. One of them said she had started to read the book the night before and couldn't wait to get back to it. She reads "polars" (crime books) all the time, she said, but somehow this one was different, and she was really intrigued.

We made a point of going and saying goodbye to them all when we left.

Ariane and Gilbert appeared late morning, and we tried to make an arrangement for lunch, but the restaurant where we were scheduled to lunch, courtesy of the municipality was only scheduled to take six from Editions du Rouergues. Our poor friends wandered off disconsolately to try to find somewhere to eat, and we went in search of Michèle to see if we could find a solution to the problem. No problem, she said, call Ariane and tell her there are places for them at the restaurant - Chez Francis, in Avenue de Paris, reckoned to be the best in town.

By coincidence, the hapless pair had just tried to get into that very restaurant, which had been recommended by a friend, and had been turned away. Complet! At which point my call came through on Ariane's mobile.

So we all met up for lunch, only to discover that Danielle and Michèle had been unable to get two extra places, and so had sacrificed theirs to partake of salads in an inferior joint across the street. No amount of argument would dissuade them from this.

Publishers are different in this country!

Another nice moment came that afternoon when a gentleman we had spoken to earlier in the day about cultural and linguistic exchanges, returned to reveal that he worked for Les Trois Epis, the bookseller, and that his boss had told him that he could chose any book at the foire, have it signed, and he would pay for it. He chose "Meurtres à Pékin", which I took as a real compliment - considering the hundreds of thousands of books available at the fair.

At the end of the day, we said fond farewells to Danielle and Michèle, and Daniel and Roger and Adeline Yzac (another Rouergue writer whom we had met that morning), and disappeared off into the cold, dark night, to make our way back to a cold, dark house and try to get it warm before collapsing into our own bed for the first time in what seemed like weeks.

And it was only three days.

An eleven hour day! There should be a union to protect writers from this. Trouble is, if we don't do it no-one else will.

This was Saturday at the Foire du Livre in Brive la Gaillarde, all day at a stand hosted by Les Trois Epis bookstore. I had a display of books and a chair and was required to be on duty all day to greet potential customers and sign the books that they bought.

We weren't in a good spot, though. Near the entrance. Everyone arriving hurried by to see the fair, not wanting to stop and look at the first display. On the way out, they'd done their buying and weren't interested in looking at anything else.

Besides which, I was sandwiched between "The Book of Cèpes", whose author never dared once to show his face (after all, how could you write a whole book about cèpes?), and "My Life with a Brute" (or words to that effect) - a comical description by a divorced women of her life of hell with men, and what changes she would like to make to them.

I saw her eyeing up my kilt a few times and felt a touch uneasy, and then got ticked off when a gaggle of teenage girls (most of whom appeared to be her children), and their spotty boyfriends, stood in front of my book display and chatted to her for hours on end.

The greatest indignity, though, was that more people seemed intersted in the cèpes than "Meurtres à Pékin". They were drawn to it like flies to the dung, although I think there were only two copies sold all day. The man hater didn't sell much either. So I suppose I had the last laugh (although laughing was the last thing I felt like doing), when I managed to sell twenty-five books. It doesn't seem like much over a long day. Five hundred euros worth of business, all the same. And when added to the sales of launch night, probably totalled around 75 books, or fifteen hundred euros.

Which doesn't make much of a dent in the six thousand copies that Editions du Rouergue have printed - about four times as many as Hodder and Stoughton produced in hardback. They clearly have faith in the book. I hope they're right.

The only bright spot in the day was lunch at the chic new restaurant Les Arums, again paid for by the municipality. This was a bright, airy, modern restaurant, with a huge salle through the back, and tall windows opening on to a luxuriantly green garden, and a young patronne who had poured herself into leather trousers that seemed somehow to have moulded themselves to her every curve. It was quite hynpnotic when she walked by our table.

We were joined - Danielle, Michèle, Daniel, La Patronne and I - by a famous French writer and broadcaster called Philippe Meyer. He was a big man with a shock of salt and pepper hair, a lovely manner and a nice sense of humour. Lunch passed in a haze of good food and wine, laughter and tight leather trousers.

All of our food and wine, it seems, over the whole weekend, is to be provided by the town. I'm not complaining.

Sales were slow in the afternoon. The place was jam packed, and La Patronne, who had sat faithfully by my side through most of the morning, was overcome by a post prandial torpor, and slipped off to take forty winks in the car, in the dark anonymity of the underground carpark beneath us. A flurry of sales in her absence, rescued me from a slow start. I heard that the queue to get in stretched all the way up the Rue de Paris, and that people were having to stand in line for more than an hour and a half.

What amazes me is that they did! What an appetite people here seem to have for books and writers.

At the end of the day - it was almost 8pm - we all traipsed off to the Boulevard Restaurant again for more good food and wine, before driving back to our hotel through dipping temperatures and thick fog.

Winter, it seems, has finally stamped on the tail end of summer.

And tomorrow we do it all over again.

Between a Cèpe and a Hard Place

Guy Fawkes night. Bonfire night. The day when everything goes up in flames and fireworks light up the sky.

Well, it wasn't quite like that last night in Brive, but it was "pas mal" all the same. There was a fabulous turnout for the booklaunch at Les Trois Epis. Sixty or more people turned up, including some old friends I hadn't seen for years.

The neighbours from my village turned out in force to support me, for which I am eternally grateful. They are good people. Even those who couldn't come asked neighbours to get them copies of the book. We sold fifty or sixty books, and the owners of the bookstore were more than delighted - a thousand euros-worth of business in an hour and a half. The publisher, too, was pleased, because it established a good relationship between themselves and a store with which they had never had a relationship. Ground was broken - in a good way.

I suppose I could have got away with not making a speech at all, or even a very truncated version of it. But having put in all the work on it this week I was damned well going to make it anyway. And boy was I nervous!

I am so used now to making book presentations in English that I am accompanied only by the odd butterfly. Last night they just about suffocated me. It is a long time since I felt that scared. My mouth got so dry towards the end that I could hardly get the words out. I dried halfway through, when my mind just went blank, and I had to call on my souffleur - Ariane - for a prompt. What seemed like an eternity to me thankfully only lasted a few seconds. Ariane gave me a line to get back into the speech, and off I went again like a demented automaton, stumbling to the end and managing, hopefully, to tell my story in the process.

All in all, it could have been worse.

The great surprise of the night was the appearance of my former neighbour from Carennac, Georges Monteiro, and his "bidey in", Brigitte, along with their young son, Antoinin, who was no more than a baby when last we saw him. It was a joy to seem them again. Georges really is the salt of the earth. We had never before done anything other than shake hands. But last night we embraced, and he made us promise to come and eat at their new home near Puybrun. I look forward to it.

Afterwards we poured out into the cool of a damp Brive evening, Danielle Dastugue, my publisher, her commercial organiser, Michèle, another Rouergue author, Daniel Crozes, and Ariane and Gilbert. We all headed off to a restaurant called "Le Boulevard", just off the Place Winston Churchill. Lights shone out through large windows on to a leaf-strewn garden which we had to cross to reach it.

The Mayor of Brive extends an invitation to publishers and writers to dine at the town's expense at one of twenty nominated restaurants. A full menu, coffee and wine included - for the Friday night, midi on Saturday, Saturday night and midi on Sunday. It's an extraordinary gesture by the municipality. No wonder the publishers and writers descend en masse from Paris.

(An interesting aside is that the underground parking beneath the market square is free for the duration of the Foire. If this were happening in the UK or the US, somehow I think the parking charges would have increased for the weekend!)

During the meal we discovered that Daniel is the longest serving writer on the books of Editions du Rouergue. He was the first writer to be published by them when they were a fledgling company run single-handedly by Danielle Dastugue, and he has written twenty-six books in the last twenty years. What a prolific output! I have to take my hat off to him. And what a nice man, too. He and I are sharing the signing sessions at the publisher's stand throughout the weekend - their oldest and their newest writers.

We also discovered that the second book in the China thrillers series, "The Fourth Sacrifice", has had its publication date brought forward so that it will be launched at the bookfair in Paris in March. This is a major honour. It was also news to Ariane, who has only just begun the translation of it.

Gawn yersel' wee yin!

The night ended with a hairy drive through the wet and the dark to our hotel in the tiny village of St. Viance, ten kilometres north of Brive. Everyone from Rouergue is staying here, but La Patronne and I were the only ones who knew the way - since we had checked in earlier in the afternoon. So everyone else followed us. Which would have been fine if La Patronne hadn't suddenly said to me as we sat at traffic lights in the town: "The lights have turned green!" I looked up and saw green. But it was the green of the next set of lights, and we promptly drove right through a set of red, leaving my publisher et al trailing in our distant wake.

However, they finally caught up, and we found our way safely to the Auberge sur Vézère, where La Patronne and I fell back in our room to work our way into a fine bottle of Glenmorangie that we had planked earlier.

Today it all begins again. I wonder if I'll still be able to speak English by the end of the weekend. Vraiment a case of death by French!

With Ariane

Well, today's the day. The French launch of "The Firemaker" under the title of "Meurtres à Pékin".

It is being held tonight at Les Trois Epis - the biggest bookstore in Brive - on the eve of the biggest bookfair in France outside of Paris, La Foire du Livre. Last year it was visited by 120,000 people over the course of the weekend, which really begins tonight when the "Book Train" arrives from Paris carrying the publishers and journalists, and more than 500 writers, from the Capital.

Many of them are attracted not only by the bookfair, but by the fact that at this time of year the traditional fare of southwest France is readily available in all the markets and shops at better prices than in Paris. I'm talking, of course, about foie fras and the confit de canard - those high fat foodstuffs which, miraculously, don't even seem to dent the French reputation for having the lowest rate of heart disease in Europe.

Hmmmmm. Eat on.

La Patronne, of course, has done her usual excellent job of preparing the publicity for the book and the launch. She has produced a press pack, in French, which is downloadable on PDF from the new French website which she has just launched. It is viewable at: http://www.petermay.fr

It also contains a link to a downloadable podcast which I have just recorded in French. Actually, it's pretty much the speech I will be giving at the launch tonight - the speech which has obsessed me for most of my waking hours for the last week.

There were two important criteria to follow. It had to be written in a French I could speak. And it had to be something I could deliver without notes. Oh, and it had to be intelligible and interesting. Now you're beginning to understand why it has obsessed me for the last seven days.

I adapted it from one of the stories I normally tell in English when doing a book tour. I created a structure that I would remember in English, and then wrote it from within my limited pool of French vocabulary. So far, so good. But the delivery is another matter altogether - especially in front of a large crowd of native French speakers.

Ariane, my translator, and her husband, Gilbert (who designed the book cover), cast an eye over it and declared it more or less intelligible. I suggested, hopefully, that maybe I should have the speech in my hand to refer to when I deliver it. But they didn't think that would look very good, so I embarked on a course of trying to commit it to memory. Arggggh. The butterflies in my stomach were whipping up a storm already.

I spent all afternoon on Tuesday with my neighbour, Laurène, going over the speech sentence by sentence. She made some minor corrections to facilitate my delivery, and I headed off home to practise some more.

That night Ariane and Gilbert and Laurène and Roger came to dinner and insisted I stand up and deliver the speech to them. It was amazing just how stressful it was to stand up in front of a group of friends to deliver a speech in French. Somehow I managed to stumble through it, and of course, they were very encouraging.

But the proof of the foie will be in the stuffing of the duck! In other words, it'll all be down to how I do on the night. I spent Wednesday and Thursday on more practice, and recorded the adaptation of it for the podcast.

Now, on Friday morning, those butterflies have multiplied and got even more frenzied. I am just about to head off and get into my kilt - US tour revisited (one of these days I must get the damned thing dry-cleaned!). Well, if nothing else, it gets me attention - and that's what I need to sell books.

And I thought all I had to do was write them!