I first got the idea for Gods Behaving Badly when I was working on a documentary being made on an American Air Force base in the U.K. I was only on set for a day or two, as a favour to a friend; her usual sound recordist couldn’t make it so she’d asked me to step in and help out. It was a fascinating, surreal place: a perfect slice of America on British soil. Everything was American, right down to the smallest detail; even the post-boxes were American, not our familiar red pillar-boxes. At certain times of day, the national anthem would play and everyone would stop what they were doing, put their hands on their hearts and bow their heads (this does not happen in many other places in the U.K.). The only way that you could tell you were still on British soil is that the imported American vehicles were being driven—by burly, heavily-armed American military personnel—on the left-hand side of the road.

My brief stint on the documentary involved recording the sound for footage taken in the on-base high school. To my British eyes it was like a school out of a American teen movie: the rows of brightly-coloured lockers, the cafeteria serving American food, the huge gym with its cheerleaders and posters for the homecoming dance, the kids in their letterman sweaters. I wonder whether being in a place that at once seemed so familiar, and yet so out of place on a flat plain in Cambridgeshire, woke up my creative juices, primed me to notice things that were out of the ordinary. Or maybe it was just luck.

In any case, we were filming in a philosophy class when inspiration struck. The teacher was explaining the differences between the gods of the ancient world—the Greek and Roman gods of mythology—and the modern Judeo-Christian God who we are more familiar with. The monotheistic God that we know, explained the teacher, is all-knowing, all-powerful, and good. The Greco-Roman gods were rather different. A huge, rambling family, locked in a constant power struggle against one another, they display character traits that we might recognise as far more human: vanity, jealousy, arrogance, anger, lust, revenge.

I’m English. I live in London. And I set my books in Miami.

Why?

Put simply, a place like Miami couldn’t exist in England. F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong about there being no second acts in American lives. America is the country of comebacks. It may let its losers fall through the cracks and break into a million pieces, but it will always cheer and cherish the person who makes back it out of the abyss and reclaims the peak. Unfortunately, in England it’s the other way round. We like losers. We champion the underdog. Sure, this is as fair and as noble as a national trait can be. But there’s a flipside, a foul play to our fair play. What we really can’t stand is when our underdogs become top dogs. It reminds us of our failures, of the fact that those we so steadfastly supported are no longer like us. So we start planning their downfalls, hacking away at the pedestal. And boy do we like it when our heroes take that high dive back to Easy Street. Sure, they can always come back, but they never come back all the way. So Miami really couldn’t live in England, because it’s the city of second acts, the capital of comebacks, the place where people go to start again. Forget Vegas. Miami is for me and you. Miami is the place you start again, the scene of your second act.

I’ve been going there for close to thirty years. My mother and I used to overnight there on our way between England and Haiti. In 1981 we spent a couple of days. It was my first time in Miami Beach, and I’ll never quite forget the ride over the causeway, the way everything had an ethereal glow about it. From a distance was like a mirage. Only this one didn’t fade or disappear on me. It stayed.