4 Things that Inspired The Getaway
The Getaway is a novel that had a long gestation period. I was thinking about it back when I was still writing (and rewriting) my first novel, Dead Ringer. I abandoned an early draft of it that wasn’t working.
I probably should have given up on it altogether, but… it was one of those ideas that whispered to me, late at night. Write me. Write ME.
Here are the four kernels of inspiration that ultimately made me say, Yeah, OK, I’ll try and write this book.
(Note: Don’t worry, this post is spoiler-free for the events of The Getaway.)
1. Billionaires on islands behaving badly
One evening, many years ago, I caught a TV documentary about a billionaire who owns a private island in the Caribbean. What stuck with me wasn’t him (billionaires strike me as fairly dull people); it was the people paid to cater to his every whim.
What must life be like for the staff who work (and often live) on those private islands?
On one hand, wow, what a dream. Tropical climes, big tips, everything paid for, breaks on the beach (rather than in a dreary staff canteen).
On the other hand, wow, what a nightmare. Imagine being trapped on an island with your boss and your co-workers.
The nightmare intensifies when you learn what billionaires get up to on their islands. There’s Jeffrey Epstein, whose Little St James in the US Virgin Islands functioned as the centre of his sex trafficking ring, or magician David Copperfield, who used his private island in the Bahamas as a lure for pretty young women.
I didn’t want to write a novel that was a pure horrorshow, but I was fascinated by the light and shade of life on a private island. That’s how my protagonist, Lola, was born: a feisty deputy manager who’s been cleaning up after billionaires her whole working life.
2. Murderer turned murderee
In my earliest draft of The Getaway, I made a rookie mistake: absolutely nothing happened. There was a murder, but it happened off-screen (*sad trombone*). Otherwise, it was a bunch of characters bustling about; a Richard Scarry book for adults, if you will.
During this early draft, however, I did spend a lot of time inventing backstory and motivation for the story’s murderer. We’re talking a novella about this guy’s life and secret pain.
When I revisited my idea for The Getaway a couple of years later, I was no longer excited about the mystery as it originally existed (did I mention the murder didn’t even happen on the island?). But the original murderer was still so vivid to me. His name was Mike Moxham, and he was the private island’s general manager.
As I strained to create a new mystery, it occurred to me: I could flip the story on its head.
Mike Moxham, this volatile guy with a strange and chaotic backstory… what if he didn’t end up a murderer? What if he got murdered instead?
This flip instantly made the mystery more interesting to me. It also meant that Moxham, although dead, felt like a living, breathing player in the whole novel.
3. The liminality of islands
Get ready for the most pretentious sentence in this entire blog post:
As a writer, I’m drawn to islands, because they’re liminal spaces. Liminality means not quite one thing, not quite another. Dusk is liminal (between day and night), islands are liminal (not quite land, not quite sea). I’d argue private islands are particularly liminal, because the usual laws don’t apply, or do they?
Keeper Island, the fictional island where The Getaway takes place, is a (liminal) character all of its own.
4. Backstabbing reality TV
From the pretentious to the low-brow…
Not only do I love liminality, I love reality TV. Survivor is one of my favourites: a social strategy game that is essentially The Traitors, except the contestants are shipwrecked on an island. Inevitably, it lent some DNA to The Getaway. A bunch of backstabbers thrown together on an island? Sounds familiar.
(I inserted and deleted the words “voted off the island” a couple of different times in my manuscript. The Survivor quote that did make its way into the novel is Troyzan’s “this is my island!”)
The other reality TV that wormed its way into my mind while planning The Getaway was Below Deck, about the trials and tribulations of working on a superyacht. (Yacht? Liminal space!) The thing I love most about the show is the weird family that the crew members form, going from strangers to bickering siblings in the space of a week.
I “cast” The Getaway the way you might cast a season of Below Deck, throwing together characters who would irritate each other, hook up, and pop off.
Inspiration for any novel always ends up being bottomless and ravenous. I was also inspired by real places in the British Virgin Islands that I visited during a holiday, Viking funeral pyres, my personal fear of falling to my death from a zip line, and the possibility of reintroducing sloths into the BVI.
