Having not thought about the show for five years, a vivid image came to me in bed one night, he says. I saw a boy in a Colombian monastery, waiting for a black car to come over the hill. For some bizarre reason, I knew who those characters were. Suddenly, I was half-awake and the rest came flying out of me. I wrote it all down in case I forgot. In the morning, I looked at my notes and thought: This is good, actually.'
In Mick Herron's 2003 debut novel Down Cemetery Road, the first of his Zoë Boehm series, protagonist Sarah Trafford gets involved in a neighborhood mystery mainly because she is bored. At least, that's how people around her see it - stuck in her picture-perfect house in Oxford with no career to speak of and her marriage slowly falling apart, she wants to feel useful.