There
are behavioral challenges with Kit as well. I mean, he bites; he goes through
stages where he likes to try to bite you because he gets a reaction. He thinks
that's hilarious, so he wants to do that again. It does throw up challenges, but
on the other hand it opens your eyes and mind to a whole other part of the world
that otherwise would have been closed to you. I've met so many ordinary heroes,
parents and caretakers looking after these kids, people who work in special-needs
schools and hospitals, whom I would never have met otherwise.
 Your
writing career was just barely taking off by the time Kit came along. How did
you survive in the early years, much less manage to live in the south of France?  Writing
was a hobby to start with, then it became a paid hobby. My first novel was published
in 1986 and I went full time in 1990, having written five books. Even then I was
having to write two books a year just to survive because I was getting $2,000
or $3,000 a book. So going full time was a big risk.
My wife
and I were living in London and we both had full-time jobs, and she said, "Look,
if you want to be a full-time writer, we can't afford to live in London anymore."
She persuaded me to move to southwest France, to this old ramshackle farmhouse
in the middle of nowhere; which we did. But the problem with that was, there was
no fallback position; if the writing didn't make us any money, we had no other
source of income. I couldn't speak French, so I wasn't going to get a job. She
had trained to teach English as a foreign language, but because we were in the
middle of nowhere, there was no one there who wanted to learn English.
“Money
changes your life in all sorts of ways.”
I
started having panic attacks. I would go driving late at night and just scream
and scream and scream, because I knew we were always on the verge of having to
give it up because the books weren't that successful. I was on the verge of being
dropped several times. And then I wrote "Black and Blue," which won
the Gold Dagger Award, and suddenly my sales quadrupled, and for the first time
I realized I was going to make a living. But it was the eighth book in the Rebus
series and was the 13th or 14th book I'd actually written before I was making
a good enough living to afford things like a mortgage.
Did it change the way you lived?
It
did, because we moved out of the apartment into a
nice big house. Money changes your life in all sorts
of ways. Two big things it's done for me: One is I
could buy a nice big house, and two, since my youngest
son has special needs, it means that anything he needs
we can buy straight away. If he needs a special wheelchair
or special bed, or guys to come in and take him out
for walks, take him swimming, get him dressed, we
can afford to buy him help. That has made a vast difference
to us. And it means that when I die, there will be
a fund of money sitting there to keep looking after
him.
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