Bad Traffic: Simon Lewis on his striking crime novel

Bad Traffic began life as a response to two real life crimes: the death by suffocation of more than fifty illegal Chinese immigrants in a lorry container, and the drowning of the cockle pickers on Morecombe Bay.

Investigating the world of illegal immigrants, and the snakehead gangs who abuse them and treat them as indentured slaves, it became obvious that this was prime material for a crime thriller - a largely unknown and dangerous milieu, whose protagonists are involved in desperate life or death struggles. And it's a huge and important subject - I was very surprised to discover, for instance, that there is now more money to be made in people smuggling than in drug smuggling, and that the majority of women who work in prostitution have been trafficked.

And I was handed a great set of villains - as I researched, I never stopped being shocked at how callous the people smuggling gangs were. I think it is important in crime fiction to try to reflect contemporary reality, and was pleased to be writing about criminals who did not fill the genre clichés - who were not, say, east end cockney gangsters or serial killers.

The book also offers the interesting opportunity to write about my own country as it might be seen through alien eyes, as a place of threat and terror, a mysterious and frightening unknown.

I researched the subject by chatting with illegal immigrants (in Chinese) wherever I saw them - in pubs, outside tube stations, bus stops - and by taking the trips across England that my characters take. And I was able to use my experience of spending four years in China to help create the characters - chatting to wide boys over games of pool or drinks, killing time with fellow passengers on back road buses, buying dodgy train tickets off shady characters, trying to wrest insurance claim forms out of recalcitrant policemen angling for a bribe - all these standard China experiences became retrospectively important as I created my characters.

As did my many hours of sitting in cheap Chinese hotel rooms with nothing but a TV for company, watching pulp Hong Kong thrillers and schlocky martial arts flicks. I decided they would be my conscious influence. I wanted the book, like them, to be fast paced and pulpy, with a high body count and plenty of action.

My main character, like the stock hero of a Hong Kong action movie, would be a violent man on a quest for bloody vengeance. There would be a beautiful girl, a naive sidekick, a heartless villain. It was great fun to take these familiar types, flesh them out and place them completely out of context in the bucolic English countryside.

I wrote the book at home or sat upstairs in the Ritzy Cafe in Brixton, in longhand at first, before typing it up. My agent of the time dumped me because he felt there was no market for a book of this type.

So I felt that I was writing into a vacuum, with little possibility of publication, and was very encouraged when the Arts Council agreed to give me a small grant so that I could carry on working, and thrilled when publishers Sort of Books said they were interested in the novel.

Bad Traffic is published by Sort of Books in the UK, publication date: 1st February 2008

Posted at 7:14PM Sunday 23 Dec 2007