By Andrew Crofts•March 07, 2025•3 min read
There is often an awkward pause in the opening moments of literary question-and-answer sessions as self-conscious fiction fans pluck up the courage to raise their hands. At least one brave soul usually breaks the ice with that old favourite: ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’
I have been giving this question some thought, with particular reference to the novels I have written over the last twenty or so years, and I have realised that all too often these ideas come to me from very dark places indeed.
The Overnight Fame of Steffi McBride was written during a time when I was ghostwriting for a number of soap stars and winners of reality television talent shows. I have always been fascinated by the way extreme fame is arbitrarily bestowed on some people – from ‘Taylor and Burton’ to ‘The Kardashians’ – and the effect that being endlessly in the media spotlight has on their lives and the lives of those around them. At the time I also had a child who was pursuing acting ambitions and was thinking about how the business worked and how to get a first foothold. The more I thought about it, the more the character of Steffi grew in my mind, and the more tortuous her experiences became.

Around the time of the Arab Spring, I was working as a ghostwriter in the Middle East, sometimes in the palaces and offices of the astonishingly wealthy and powerful people at the top, sometimes with those who were struggling at the bottom of the social pile. I was also spending a lot of time trying to tame a large garden in England and passing many hours thinking beside bonfires, contemplating the inequities of life and the consequences that seemed to be unravelling for some of the world’s dictators. Gradually the characters and storyline of Secrets of the Italian Gardener emerged in my head. Most of the resulting story takes place within the confines of the palace of a dictator who is about to be overthrown.
When Donald Trump won his first term as president I was stunned. I guess I was – and possibly still am – living in a ‘liberal elite’ bubble, unable to imagine that such a thing could ever occur. For many months I found it hard to tear my eyes off Twitter as I attempted to make sense of the new reality.
Many years before, I had predicted, in a book titled Hype! The Essential Guide to Marketing Yourself, that property tycoon Donald Trump could probably achieve whatever he wanted in life from the publicity platform he had created for himself, but I had never imagined he would be awarded the world’s top job. Anyway, it got me thinking, with the result that I took the ghostwriter narrator from Secrets of the Italian Gardener and sent him to Hollywood, where a film star and a tech billionaire were working together to get a crime family voted into the White House. The result was the novel What Lies Around Us.
A couple of years ago my wife and I moved to an insanely idyllic village, right at the centre of the country. If you were to describe the perfect, fictional English village, this one would be it. We live on a high street which is used by more horses and dogs than cars, with uninterrupted views across a valley on the other side. There are families who have lived here for generations, with newcomers like us only just starting to edge in. When I am working in the front garden, behind the post box, or walking around the village, everyone stops to chat and gossip and slowly but surely the much grimmer history of the village depicted in On the Backs of Others started to take root in the most shadowy part of my mind. The more I thought about the characters I was inventing to live in this fictional village, the more the darkness which must lie in the depths of my subconscious rose to the surface.
As a ghostwriter, I have written dozens of books for the victims of abuse, oppression, crime and exploitation (an early novel I wrote, initially titled Maisie’s Amazing Maids, later reissued as Pretty Little Packages, was on exactly those subjects), and I guess I have been shaped by the stories I’ve heard to see sinister undercurrents and bad intentions everywhere, even behind the idyllic cottage facades of an entirely innocent English country village.
So, the ideas for stories tend to be triggered for me by external events or people that I meet on my travels, and are then propelled by plots that rise up from the stories I have been told about the very darkest sides of human nature.