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Nigel Bartlett

Goodreads Author

Born

in Australia

Member Since

February 2015

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/nigelbartlett

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Nigel Bartlett is a freelance writer and editor who has worked for many of the best-known publications in Australia.

He's a former deputy editor of GQ Australia and Inside Out magazines and has been a regular contributor to Belle and Sunday, the colour supplement for the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Herald Sun. In addition, he's freelanced for numerous other titles, ranging from Who to Sunday Life and Harper's Bazaar, as well as a number of high-profile websites. In 2012 he completed a research masters in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney.

He lives in the inner-city suburb of Redfern. ...more

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Hi Nigel! I've just finished reading King Of The Road for my book club - I couldn't put it down! I generally read a lot of true crime so it suited me quite well. Were there any particular news stories that inspired you to write this? How did you go about researching this 'dark world' of the internet? Will you be publishing any more thrillers?

Nigel Bartlett Hi Sara,

Great to hear from you - thanks for getting in touch. I'm really pleased you enjoyed King of the Road. Thanks for letting me know!

The story wa…moreHi Sara,

Great to hear from you - thanks for getting in touch. I'm really pleased you enjoyed King of the Road. Thanks for letting me know!

The story was inspired (perhaps strangely...) by two incidents in my own life. One was when I took a close friend's dog out for a walk and then lost her. My friend was absolutely distraught. It was in the middle of London, we had no idea where the dog had gone (actually someone had taken her) and if we'd ever get her back. She managed to escape the person and find her way home several hours later, but it was a terrible feeling. I felt I'd done something terrible that my friend would never forgive me for. I was due to fly back to Australia the next day and knew I wouldn't be able to do that if the dog was still missing. And what if we never found her?

That (maybe strangely) planted the seed of the idea of "What if you were looking after someone else's child and lost it? My parents reinforced this idea when they told me how they'd lost my 4-year-old niece in the car park of a big adventure park, just as the sun was going down, and it was right next to a major motorway. They had visions of my niece being bundled into a car and swept away, hundreds of miles. (They found her, 20 minutes later, but it was a horrible time.)

Then I was at Byron Bay on holiday with an old flatmate. We were on the beach and he decided to swim way out to see if he could spot any dolphins. After an hour or so, he hadn't come back and I started to panic. Then (for some paranoid reason) I thought, "What if I report this to the police and they somehow think I drowned him?" (I'm a bit of a worrier, with an over-active imagination...) He did come back, but it planted another seed in my head for a story.

Once I started writing the story, I kept thinking "Is this reall unrealistic?" But then I saw more and more small stories in the papers of children who'd nearly been kidnapped in Sydney suburbs - they were small stories because the attempts were unsuccessful. Or I'd hear about horrific cases of filming children and so on. Then I started researching these cases, reading books about the police who have to sift through these terrible videos and how they piece together evidence from the most insignificant-seeming clues (eg: a brand name on a box in the background of a film).

Shortly before I sent the book out to potential agents, the William Tyrrell case happened, which was just so sad. In King of the Road, David looks at Andrew's bed, which has an Incredible Hulk doona cover. That doona cover was originally a Spider-Man cover. I changed it because I didn't want readers to feel I was exploiting the William Tyrrell case, and I certainly didn't want to distress his family (if, by chance, any of them should hear about my book). It was one of those unfortunate coincidences - and yet, that case also confirmed for me that the risk of child abduction is very real.

I read a lot about how how these people operate on the internet. Now things have moved on a lot, and the "dark web" is even more sophisticated, which is very scary. I hope the authorities find a way of cracking down on it.

I'm working on my second crime thriller, and hope to send it off to my agent in the next couple of months. I'm a relatively slow writer, but it's coming together well now I hope!

Thanks so much for taking the time to write to me, and for taking an interest in King of the Road.

All the best,

Nigel.(less)

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Average rating: 3.74 · 107 ratings · 29 reviews · 1 distinct work • Similar authors

King of the Road

3.74 avg rating — 107 ratings — published 2015 — 4 editions

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May 23, 2021 12:39PM

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