Since I began this somewhat irregular series, my list of stolen inspirations has expanded somewhat. More than anything else I've written, How to Disappear Completely had an impressive gestation period. I used to marvel that it took Joseph Heller seven years to write Catch 22 (that's on my list, by the way) but from the first time I typed Kilbey's name to the last, most of a decade had passed and the next was nearly over.

In that period, you'd imagine that my interests would have altered fairly dramatically. I was 17 when I wrote the beginning of Kilbey's story - at that stage he was a middle-aged detective investigating the death of a blue-eyed duck (I'd just finished reading Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently books, which are also on the list) called Kilbey Salmon De La Hunty - and I'm 30 now. So many bands and fads and movements arose and dispersed in those thirteen years, their influence waxing and waning. Grunge, Britpop, Generation X-fiction, Post-Rock, Harry Potter. Ultimately the final draft that I embarked on in 2005 was - barring a few sections written in 2000 - fresh, as they should be. The last thing I wanted to produce was something mired in the mid-1990s.

The one constant influence throughout this period was, unquestionably, Doctor Who. The fact that is was missing from the airwaves throughout that entire period is, in some ways, crucial to the novel's gestation. When Who went off the air in 1989, it was the first time in 26 years it hadn't been around. Sad as it is, part of the process that led me to write HtDC was a desire for something to take its place. In other words, the absence of a regular Who fix led me to attempt to replicate something that matched its genius, without ripping it off wholesale.

I think there was also always a nagging sensation that Doctor Who was rarely quite as good as you wanted it to be. There was something magical and addictive about it, nonetheless, but it didn't touch genius as often as the concept deserved. Writing my own stories allowed me to fill that gap between concept and execution in a way that felt more satisfying.


Doctor Who was with me when I was born and, at this rate, is likely to be part of me until the (hopefully distant) end. I have no idea why this should be, but there it is. Blame my father and his father before him. My grandfather bears a passing resemblance to Jon Pertwee and my father to Tom Baker, so perhaps Who is hardwired into my genes. (Although that would make me Peter Davison which, while being preferable to Colin Baker, lacks any great appeal.)

The premise of the show is undeniably attractive. A slightly eccentric, anarchic, moral figure able to traverse the entirety of the space and time in a telephone box. In the process, the program was able to slide across an incredible range of genres, styles, contexts and subtexts. I never really read much science fiction and it's not a genre that excites me greatly, but this was something else. It was unconstrained, capable of telling any kind of story in any kind of place. That freedom to blend and shift genres still appeals and is at the heart of How to Disappear Completely.

Tom Baker - still thought by most to be the definitive - was the Doctor when I was born and one of my earliest memories is watching him fall to his death and transform into Peter Davison. For reasons that remain mysterious to me, I was convinced at the time that he had actually transformed into Griff Rhys-Jones. Strange.

More than any other actor, Tom was the Doctor. In his later years, he admitted that he thought the best way to play an alien was to, more or less, play Tom Baker. Fiercely intellectual and frequently silly, righteous and irreverent, the man probably had more influence on my childhood morality than God.

With an actor so inventive and unpredictable, the series infused me with a sense of the possibilities of imagination. Rather than being a handicap, the ropable special effects encouraged leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief that made it possible to then invent new stories and scenarios in the backyard. An alien need appear no more fearsome than a few tin cans and a rubbish bin to pose a serious and terrifying threat. I suspect my interest in creating narratives and scenarios - that obsessive impulse to create and write new and exciting worlds - stemmed from this. The first stories I wrote were, in all likelihood, Doctor Who stories.

Obviously, the real world became increasingly compelling over the next decade and I stopped inventing my own in the backyard. The stories I wrote reflected my own experience, as you might expect, and I was more interested in exploring that world than far distant ones.

As for Doctor Who, it all became a little white and sterile throughout the 1980s, more scientific than magical. In doing so, it lost most of its appeal to me, which was the possibilities in opened up in the real world. A telephone box could be spaceship, seaweed the hideous insides of a metallic robot, shop window dummies were waiting to spring into life and wreak slaughter upon suburban streets. Once Who moved off into far distant corners of the cosmos in ever-more-ridiculous outfits, I tuned out. Space never interested me as much at the world outside my front door.

It's this dual interest in the fantastic and the mundane that created How to Disappear Completely, a world where a London cab could take you anywhere and your own shadow might eat you while you're not looking. I think Who instilled an interest in what might be just around the corner, just out of sight, laying in wait in the most ordinary of places. The book very deliberately starts in the real world, as a story of a young woman feeling lost in a big city. Act III is set on a London housing estate as a reminder that, no matter how far we go into Kilbey's world, the real world is still here and just as important. I feel the reality of that setting and the ordinariness of that character is essential, given what follows. I wouldn't want to read a book that started on another planet or with a dragon swooping over vast green plains etc etc. Such things say nothing to me about my life, to misquote Morrissey.

I wanted How to Disappear to say something about life as I saw it, before it departed for somewhere else entirely.

SOON(ISH): Kilbey's character and Doctor Who