Finding people

Like many people I have a fascination with the stories of missing people… it seems so heartbreaking when someone disappears from a family, sometimes for no apparent reason, sometimes for a hidden or secret reason, and sometimes it is just the end of a long drift of gradual separation. Sometimes a family have been split, or a child adopted, and children who are powerless to do very much, are separated from a parent or siblings, or grandparents; tragic for all concerned. There are many charities which try and find ‘lost’ people, and of course sometimes perhaps many times, the lost don’t want to be found. This interest that I have, the interest in the story, and the hope for a happy or at least satisfactory resolution, is shared by others, hence the TV programmes and media articles, and books about finding people who have become apart from family or friends.

As a writer I have written about ‘lost’ characters many times, and the search for them is a theme of several of my books. In Farholm, a woman has found an extraordinary secret about her dead husband, and is seeking the man she has lost; in Loving Judah, a father travels to India to find his lost son; in Night Vision a man has lost his brother; my Radwinter stories feature not only a search for lost relatives from the past, but the main character, Thomas is also commissioned to find lost people in the present – a missing daughter, a disappeared friend, a lost father.

I don’t use any real people as models for characters – well, I should modify that and say that I don’t base my characters on anyone I actually know. So a person I fleetingly see, like the young man in my featured picture, a woman on the bus, a couple walking along the sea front, the person who works in my local bookshop, a TV chef… any of those can become a model for my characters, Sometimes I have the outline of a character in my mind, maybe i can’t quite imagine what the character looks like, or walks like, or sounds like; then I have to look for my ‘missing’ person.

Friends? Or just colleagues? What are they talking about, does one love another? The glimpse of a group of ordinary people can send my imagination racing…