Change of course

If anyone is qualified to write a children's novel which includes a kidnap at sea, it is Dubai-based author Linda Davies. After all, she is an accomplished author, has three young children and was herself kidnapped while sailing on a yacht. Incredibly, the much-publicised arrest by the Iranian authorities of Davies, a Briton in her early 40s, happened after she had written about the capture at sea of the parents of the main character in her new children's book, Sea Djinn.

The memory of the two-week detention endured by Davies, her financier husband Rupert Wise and their Australian skipper is still raw, two years after the event. The trio were arrested when their boat strayed close to the disputed island of Abu Mousa in the Gulf.

"There were a couple of occasions when we feared for our lives and we didn't know how long we would be held. Not knowing how long it will be until you see your children is incredibly hard," Davies says.

"If you know in advance it's for two weeks it's OK, but after 10 days we were released then re-arrested and things got a lot worse than they were to start with. When we got back after two weeks, my daughter [then aged 1] had pneumonia and separation anxiety. She was deeply traumatised.

Afterwards I stopped working for a year — as much for my children as for me."

After her ordeal, which came when she was about halfway through writing Sea Djinn at the family villa in Umm Suqueim, Davies added a paragraph to the book about the experience. "I wrote about the emotional impact, not the politics. I expressed how it felt," she says.

Sea Djinn, which is set in Dubai and published by Dubai-based Jerboa Books, represents a major departure for Oxford graduate Davies.

Making "running away money"

Her first five books were thrillers for adults set in and around the world of high finance, a subject she knew well owing to the seven years she spent in investment banking in New York, London, Paris, Milan and Eastern Europe. During this period, Davies was trying to earn what she calls her "running away money" — a nest-egg that would give her the freedom to do what she wanted in life.

"Banking was always meant to be temporary. It was a chance to do a serious job and earn some serious money," she says. "I did six years in corporate finance and a year on the trading floor and that was more than enough — it was a pretty unpleasant environment."

Before she left banking, Davies was working towards realising her long-held ambition to be a writer. It was no easy task to come up with the plot for her debut novel, Nest of Vipers, which was published in 1995. Davies wrote 30 to 40 page ones of novels, only to abandon them because she was writing about a "character in search of a plot".

"Then one day I was sitting at my trading desk one day feeling particularly angry and I thought: ‘How much damage could I do sitting here?'" she says. "I worked out a huge financial crime that I had no intention to commit. It was fun to think up and it was done in a fit of pique. I came up with a really good idea about insider trading in the foreign exchange markets."

In the last six months of her time in banking, Davies would wake at about 5.30am, be in work an hour later and then, after she had finished at about 5.30pm, go home and spend several hours writing in longhand, usually finishing at about 2am. She was only getting a few hours' sleep a night.

"I was trading large amounts of money, but for that you need to be very sharp. I knew I would make a monumental error and I didn't want that kind of stress," she says.

The same year as Nest of Vipers was released, and just a couple of weeks after they married, Davies and Wise moved to Lima, the capital of Peru.
Because of Wise's job as a senior investment banker, he and his wife were prime targets for kidnappers. Anyone holding them could have demanded millions of dollars in ransom.

"I loved Peru — it was staggeringly beautiful and exploring it was magical — but I didn't like Lima. We had armed guards and I was not allowed to go out on my own. I had to have a bodyguard. We even had a shoot-out in our garden," Davies says.

Three years ago, after a period spent back in England while Wise was working in the Middle East, Davies came out to Dubai. She writes using a computer in her bedroom at the villa she and Wise share with their children Hugh, 9, Tom, 7 and Lara, 3.

"It's the only room where I don't get ambushed by the children. Lara is at nursery for three mornings a week, so I write then, and if they have friends round in the afternoon I can sneak in for half an hour here and there," she says.

"Sometimes it's frustrating not to be able to do it for four hours at a time, but I keep reminding myself it's like climbing a mountain — one step at a time and I will get there."

Davies hopes Sea Djinn will get picked up by a major UK publisher after its release here, but whatever happens, she intends it to be just the first in a series of four books.

She is already halfway through writing the second, Fire Djinn, which if all goes to plan, will be out this time next year.

"I don't dumb things down [when writing for children]. I use the same vocabulary as in an adult novel, minus the swear words," she says.

"I would try to use children's dialogue. It is less stilted and more direct and more honest than adults'. It's a challenge to get the distinct voice of children."