Hi

On 25th October 1999, a band called Sneaker Pimps released their second album. The first track was calming yet disturbing. 

The name of that song sat in my memory for many years before I resurrected it and incorporated into ‘Beyond The Shining Portals’. 

If you’ve read the book, you may recall that the song playing on the juke box in the Retro Bar, where Jack met Elektra and Leah in the calm world of the City and its disturbing counterpart in the Forest, was ‘Half Life’. 

‘Half Life’, was the origin of the ‘half-life girls’ that appear in the ‘Portals’ trilogy, the books I’m currently working on.

About the time I started writing, I had a Mandarin-speaking language exchange partner. I remember checking her out on Facebook before meeting her. I was smitten by her photo. I met her in Caffe Nero next to the Cutty Sark, near London Bridge. 

She was impressively well-prepared for someone so young. She was maybe 21 or 22. She had a good job working in a jewellers in Hatton Garden catering for high net worth clients, and, of course, she was dealing with their Chinese clientele. Her love-life was chaotic. She was a cheerful, beautiful person with high hopes and ambitions. 

And then, between meetings, I saw an announcement in Facebook that she had died. 

I couldn’t believe that someone so young, so vibrant, so full of life could be taken so suddenly. 

So I poured something of her lively personality into Elektra and the other half-life girls. 

Half-life girls also live, at most, 21 or 22 years. And that was the third ingredient.

I needed a fourth ingredient. 

In ‘Beyond The Shining Portals’, when Michael Basilicus, returns to ‘purple’ Edinburgh, in some trepidation, he makes his way to the St Vincent Bar (it exists). And this is where he (and I) met the most alluring woman he (and I) have ever had the fortune or misfortune to meet. 

Elektra and the other half-life girls have dimples. This girl had a beauty spot.

One time, I said to her, ‘that beauty spot really makes your face’. And she replied ‘Charles, you have no idea how many men have said that to me.’ I reproduce that snippet of conversation almost word for word in ‘Beyond The Shining Portals’.  

The girl had ‘it’. What exactly ‘it’ is, is difficult to explain. She drew men to her like moths to a flame. 

I put all these ingredients into a cauldron and stirred them together over heat, and that’s how the half life girls were born.