Like all my novels, The Prisoner's plot sprang out from the snippets of bizarre or unusual news and facts I keep stored in vast files.

From my treasure chest I selected two files: The first contained statistics of the United States Prison System showing a threefold inmate population increase within the last fifty years, coupled to a tenfold increase in costs. The second file contained a collection of newspaper articles dealing with human hibernation:

The Times April 22, 2005
Suspended animation is poised to move from science fiction to reality: scientists have successfully induced a state of reversible hibernation in mammals for the first time, using methods that could eventually be applied to human beings.

The breakthrough in the United States promises to allow doctors to slow human metabolism almost to a standstill, protecting critically ill patients from damage to the brain and other organs that would normally be inflicted by oxygen deprivation. Patient trials could begin within five years.

Please, note the date and the vague five year forecast. Two years later, I discovered scientists were making inroads in the so far budding science, and announcing imminent human trials.

The Sunday Times May 27, 2007
Race to be first to ‘hibernate’ human beings John Harlow in Los Angeles.

Turning science fiction into science fact, American doctors are preparing to chill volunteers. into a state of suspended animation that could keep them asleep for months.

Medical teams in Los Angeles, Boston and Pittsburgh are racing to become the first to test out new theories of “induced hibernation” which could save lives and also help to send man towards the stars.

Hasan Alam, a surgeon at Massachusetts general hospital and consultant to the US army, is poised to start the first human trials before the end of the year.

I figured that just like the discovery of fireworks led inevitably to the cannon, human hibernation, if conquered, could change the future prison systems. If scientists manage to pull this particular rabbit out of science’s hat, the world will change beyond our wildest dreams. Or nightmares.

From these two facts, I drafted a novel structure, composed a synopsis and wrote the first six chapters. My agent took the proposal over to Random House and they bought it. Then the guys and gals at Bantam inserted, on the back page of Perfect Circle, my previous novel, this plug :

Fifty years from now, the cost of maintaining a burgeoning prison population has driven the American government to its knees. Hypnos, a private corporation, offers a solution: A state of the art hibernation system. Crime levels plummet. Until one bold prison break, engineered by a highly-trained team, removes a particular prisoner from stasis— a prisoner who can expose Hypnos’ rotten core and the many abuses of what once looked to be the perfect system.

Which sums up the plot. But writing The Prisoner, was far more difficult than I had anticipated.

Researching the science behind Prisoner was like extracting coins from Scrooge’s purse. Scientists in Italy, Russia and the US, refused to part with much solid data, taking refuge not in the now worn ‘top secret’ formula but the ‘industrial property’ one.

In addition, a large proportion of the novel's plot takes place in the sewers, and I knew next to nothing about the netherworld below the city streets. But that was before I enlisted the help of the fearless fraternity of urban explorers in three continents.

After reading the rough manuscript, my editor counseled: "You must tone down the shit". I did.