Authors Electric

    The first time I actively set out to research something was when I was writing a play about an escaped tiger, for Radio 4’s Afternoon Theatre. Up until then I’d written about what I knew, but when you’re in your twenties you run out of stuff pretty quickly unless you live in a small village filled with single men in possession of a good fortune who must be in want of a wife. All I knew about tigers was what I’d read in books, principally Jim Corbett’s Man-Eaters of Kumaon . In those days Chessington World of Adventures was Chessington Zoo, and they had tigers, so I rang up and asked if I could talk to the tiger keeper. I think I expected an animal lover who was both entranced and obsessed with his charges, so the first question I asked was, “How long have you worked with tigers?” The answer was rather unexpected – “Too long.” He regarded tigers as the most dangerous of all animals in the zoo, and was looking for another job. He seemed to think he was living on borrowed tim...