Chris Calder admits to having been in his healthy seventies before he wrote his first novel. Following an interesting if occasionally precarious (he admits) period running his small engineering business, he retired to rural France with his wife. Modernising an old farmhouse and doing a Lazarus job on the adjacent derelict cottage to make it suitable for holiday letting kept him out of mischief. As he settled into an active, healthy lifestyle, Chris looked forward to enjoying his tranquil rural existence for years to come. But just when he thought that life couldn’t be better, the bombshell dropped. He was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer.
The consultant explained that Chris would need an endoscopy to determine the size and location of the tumour, followed by a course of chemotherapy. The endoscopy was carried out a few days later (they don’t hang around in France) and was successful. But it nearly ended differently, an experience that Chris recorded later in a short humorous piece called Drama in the Theatre.
After that procedure Chris was recuperating in hospital, spending time reading and thinking. Television wasn’t an option because at the time his command of the French language was, he says, awful. But during that thinking time he had the germ of an idea for a novel, based loosely on some of the more interesting and arguably bizarre incidents that he had experienced in his working life. Several months of chemotherapy followed, giving Chris plenty of time to keep working on the story.
A week after completing the chemo he was back in hospital for the major operation and spent two weeks in recovery. He had the time and the motivation to flesh out the story and a few months later his debut novel Payback was published.
Since then there have been two more, My Brother’s Keeper and now the latest, Celeste Three is Missing. Chris has always been fascinated by all things to do with aviation and the idea for the plot of this story arose out of the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines MH370. What, he wondered, if such a fate were to be suffered by a passenger-carrying space plane like the Virgin Galactic? And how could that come about? Putting together a credible plot for that premise led to the writing of the novel.
Chris says that he is no longer retired; he now has a new career, writing novels to the background music of birdsong. It’s a tough life!
More information on Chris's website
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