The personal attribute contributing most to my novel, Harbour Views, has been the compulsion to observe. In that I’m probably no different from hundreds of other authors, except the very best for whom imagination towers over everything. The outcome for the book is a cast of characters that is an amalgam of people from dozens of chance encounters and fleeting sightings on the streets of Hong Kong and, not least, the city itself, with its sharp cultural distinctions, slipping into place somewhat accidentally as the story’s main persona. If the desire to observe has any origin, it has lain in the nomadic pursuit of a human resource career, which primarily earned my living and where I spend long periods assessing the probabilities of whether certain personalities, irrespective of skills, will fit, with all their baggage of bad chemistry and unknowable agendas, into an organization’s work force. No time is ever lost in the crowded bus or the airport lounge when constructing the circumstances of the person sitting or standing opposite. Such assessments are a solitary pursuit, not unlike the act of creative writing, which, for me, has to be totally devoid of distraction, except for the low volume of Bach or Wagner keeping the world at bay from the background. The book’s blurb talks of the central character’s influence on the lives of others; I prefer to think of him as the thread on which a loose association hangs, until falling apart with his demise. I’ve chosen to tell the story as a tragic-comedy mix, partly because that’s the way I view the world, but also because if it is done well, it has the ability to most engage an audience. I’ll have to leave it to the reader to decide whether I have...