The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
The debut novel from Roy Burnett is steeped in his fascination for Arabic culture, writes Jamie Wilde
Eye For An Eye is the debut novel from Aberdeenborn-and-raised author Roy Burnett. Roy attended Kaimhill School and Aberdeen Technical College before beginning a successful career in the oil and gas industry, which took him to the Middle East for long spells since 1980.
It was there where his fascination for Arabic culture and history took hold and he still keeps in touch with many friends from the region today.
“The Middle East has always been a special area to me,” says Roy.
“I lived in Dubai for five years when it was a tiny place with only one tall building. You go there now and the difference is night and day!
“My work required a lot of travelling and waiting around in airports, so a book was always at hand to help me pass the time.”
Retired since 2015, Roy decided to write his debut novel, which took him three years to finish.
“I think there’s a saying that everybody’s got a book in them,” he says, “but very few people actually go and start writing it.
“There are definitely true elements weaved into the fiction.
“I had an initial story of a Scottish guy in the Middle East – having seen many Scots throughout the Middle East myself – then I took some of the situations that I saw around me and tried to weave that into a story.”
Eye For An Eye revolves around ex-Army officer Rory McAdam.
Born in Aberdeen and a fluent Arabic speaker, Rory is recruited by MI6 after a medical discharge from the Army and is dropped into Isis territory for his first mission.
Secret information and assassination attempts take the storyline from Lebanon to France and Afghanistan to Iraq, with Roy’s personal observations and research bringing real-life essences into the plot.
“I wanted to be as accurate as possible on the areas that I was writing about,” Roy explains, and though
he adds that this was a part of the writing process that he enjoyed, he admits there were also obstacles to overcome.
“(Writing the book) was a stop-start process,” he says. “I wasn’t doing it religiously long, but I had bursts of writing, then I’d think about how to link the parts together as I was going through.
“Linking these was definitely the hardest part of writing the book.”
In the end though, Roy managed to flesh out the book he knew he had in him – with a little bit of help from friends and family along the way.
“My three daughters and my wife were all proofreading manuscripts and came back to me saying things like, ‘That didn’t make sense, you need to be clearer here’,” he says.
“They were really encouraging all the way through the process, and I’m working on a follow-up as we speak.
“I think I’ve still got a couple of more books in me before I kill my characters off!”
Eye For An Eye by Roy Burnett, £7.99, self-published.