When 11 year-old Georgie befriends an eccentric retired scientist, she becomes the test subject for a thrilling new experiment: a virtual-reality 3-D version of the future.
But then a deadly disease threatens the life of every dog I the country and Georgie’s beloved dog, Mr Mash, gets sick. And that’s only the start of her troubles.
Soon Georgie, her best friend Ramzy and Mr Mash embark on a desperate quest: to save every dog on earth, and maybe even all of humanity…
…without even leaving the room!
How did you come up with Dr Pretorius?
I have always wanted to create a “mad professor”, and so Dr Pretorius – one of the lead characters in The Dog Who Saved The World – grew out of that.
I wanted this mad professor to be both different and recognisable. So, as well as making her an elderly black woman, she has lots of white hair (like those pictures of Albert Einstein) and a manic cackle. She wears a white lab coat and is called “Doctor” like Doc Brown in Back To The Future.
Her name – Pretorius – is borrowed from the mad scientist, Septimus Pretorius, in an old 1930s movie The Bride Of Frankenstein.
“Pretorius” is a South African name, and so it made sense that her personal history included that country. Her first name – Emilia – is my daughter’s middle name. It is a Scandinavian name, and so I gave Dr Pretorius a bit of Norwegian back-story.
Why is Dr Pretorius’s lab in The Spanish City?
The Spanish City is a real place in Whitley Bay. Now, it is a leisure complex with restaurants and so on, but when I was a boy it housed an old-fashioned ballroom, with amusement arcades at the front and a funfair at the back.
In early drafts of the story, Dr Pretorius’s laboratory was in a converted floor of an old house, but I felt I needed something more dramatic. The Spanish City was undergoing refurbishment at the time I was writing the story in 2018 and it made me think that the large dome would make a good Virtual Reality studio. (I took one or two liberties with the layout of the building in order to make the story work!)
The Spanish City in the 1970s, with ‘The Big Dipper’
The Spanish City today
The dome interior
Update: The global pandemic that threatens dogs (and humans) in The Dog Who Saved The World has obvious, almost spooky, parallels with the worldwide outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020. The fictional “Canine-borne Ebola” (CBE) originates in China and spreads rapidly, first through dogs and then “jumping” to humans. Governments worldwide struggle to respond adequately, and people are gripped by panic.
It is, of course, just coincidence: the book was written and published long before Covid-19 came along. Now that we know what a pandemic really looks like, readers may like to spot the things I got right and the things I guessed wrong!
By the way, if you’re thinking the parallels to real-life might make the book too scary, be assured: there’s a happy ending and I have been careful to bear in mind my core readers’ age.
