In the last post, I asked about your heroes and, via the Comments, Teresa asked me about the origins of some of the heroes in my novels.
Martyn Mayfair, from Love & Freedom, is easy. I stole him from a single shot of actor and musician Jared Leto. Jared doesn’t always look like this, but this is the image I had in my head.
Starting Over’s Ratty is less easy because he came from watching Kevin Kline in the 1983 production of the Pirates of Penzance. I’m no opera (or operatta) buff but I love the Pirates and watching KK as the pirate king, leader of his gang, doing things exactly his own way, I mentally stripped off the Errol Flynn moustache and gave him blue eyes. And Ratty was born. For a flavour, see this clip.
Justin, from All That Mullarkey, is definitely a pastiche of a young Bryan Brown and motor cycle legend Carl Fogarty. You have to scale both of them back age-wise, but I can do that …
So, any of these images resonate with you?


















