A straight shooter

Surrounded by mountains in the tiny principality of Andorra, Peter Smith dreams up audacious terrorist plots. Fortunately, Smith has no intention of wreaking havoc across the globe. His wild imagination only creates dangerous scenarios that his fictional character James Richter must resolve.

Richter works for an outfit attached to the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and in Smith's latest novel, Payback, he finds himself in a race against time to thwart a catastrophic terrorist attack on Dubai. Smith, who uses the alias James Barrington when writing the Richter novels, is a trained military pilot with experience in the field of covert operations and espionage.

The tranquil area in which Smith resides is a million miles away from the scenarios portrayed in his series of espionage thrillers. He has spent the best part of the last two decades living in Andorra with his wife of 26 years, Sara Anne Smith. They have no children together but they do have a "small dog".

Diverse plots

Smith, originally from Cambridge in the United Kingdom, added: "Andorra is a very small country and some people find it a bit claustrophobic because there are mountains everywhere. However, the place has an excellent police force and health service.

"I actually like Dubai. I know some people say it is a bit of an acquired taste but I still find it a very exciting and electric city," the 62-year-old told Weekend Review from his home in Andorra.

"All my novels involve the same character [Richter] and I try to think of something a bit different each time.

"The first book Overkill involved an Al Qaida plot to decimate the United States using nuclear weapons. The second book of the series, Pandemic, was about a worldwide epidemic involving a fairly different set of villains.

"Foxbat was about North Korea and its nuclear ambitions whereas Timebomb concerned a German terrorist group targeting London. For Payback I wanted to do something different. I thought about 9/11 and how it effectively changed the face of New York forever. There is no doubt the targeting of the Twin Towers was deliberate because they could have targeted the Empire State Building.

"The most iconic symbol in Dubai, in my opinion, is the Burj Al Arab. That became a fairly obvious target, so I built a story around the hotel by pulling in elements of espionage and covert operations. The mantra of the story is basically ‘you knock one of our towers down, we'll knock one of your towers down'."

Smith has been writing ever since he sent an angry letter to a motoring magazine at the age of 17. The editor sent Smith £5 (Dh28) so he continued to write during his time in the services as a way of supplementing his income.

Smith joined the Royal Navy in his early twenties where he was streamed to become a helicopter pilot.

However, his fledgeling flying career came to an abrupt end when he suffered a detached retina in his right eye. Smith joined air traffic control, where he continued to do some fixed wing flying, before moving to London, where he carried out a number of "staff jobs that covered a multitude of sins".

Modelled on different people

Smith said: "Some people have asked if Richter is autobiographical but I certainly don't go around the world killing people. However, Richter is based fairly squarely on a guy I knew in the military, a naval officer who was on occasion seconded to work with the SIS on an unofficial basis. He never admitted his role but he would disappear for six weeks at a time and come back with a heavy suntan and scars. Whatever he was doing was covered by the Official Secrets Act but he did admit certain things in private conversations.

"I initially needed to see his face when I was writing about Richter, who is an amalgam of different people with the ex-military guy forming the basis of the character. Richter is independent and a loner who does not work well as a team member. He is modelled on various people I met in the military. The people these organisations send out into the field are invariably self-reliant; that is their defining characteristic. They just get on with the job.

"Richter is working in the same world as the secret agent but I do try to haul a bit of reality into my books; the idea of a secret agent who is known to hotel managers around the world is simply nonsense. Secret agents don't drive about in Aston Martins; they drive Ford Escorts or something equally mundane. The people the SIS employ are more like Richter than James Bond; he is a low-class secret agent.

"I give the bad guys as good a chance as I can in my novels and I try and make it as difficult as I can for the good guys to counter whatever plot is unravelling. I try to keep things as realistic as possible and that seems to work."