ROBERT LEADER
HOW THE STORIES CAME TO BE WRITTEN
When the Gulf war was taking place I was still filing press cuttings on any international event that could possibly provide a background for a novel. It was something I had done for many years until the wealth of information on the internet made my files obsolete. At that stage I had an entire filing cabinet filled with fat envelopes on every county in the world. They were the inspiration for many of my early thrillers and my Iraq file provided most of the background for THE BAGHDAD BETRAYAL.
The inspiration for THE COVID CONSPIRACY was, of course, the Covid pandemic. With so many Covid conspiracies floating about the internet it was easy to pick out two that fitted the plot. The book is fiction but we authors do tend to dovetail our fictional stories intro factual backgrounds to make them as credible as possible.
There is one more Falcon adventure to come. Like everyone else climate change concerns me and this has inspired the THE SOLAR ALTERNATIVE, the Falcon mission that I am writing now.
In GOD, FAITH AND TERROR, one of my philosophy books as Robert Leader, I suggested that instead of supporting international terrorism the best use of Arab oil wealth would be to finance a solar power station in space. In THE SOLAR ALTERNATIVE one incredibly wealthy oil sheikh does just that. Of course he has a fanatical brother dedicated to the opposite path who hijacks the enterprise and tries to turn the power station into a totally destructive beam weapon.