With the release date of David Jarvis’s new Mike Kingdom spy thriller approaching we asked David to tell us about the origins of his protagonist and the first novel in the series The Tip of the Iceberg.
On a dull day in 1999, and for reasons I cannot remember, I read a short document entitled the Antarctic Treaty and was blown away.

It is only twenty-three pages long and came into force in 1961 designating the continent south of 60°S latitude exclusively for peaceful purposes, banning military activity, nuclear tests, and radioactive waste disposal. It was signed by Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, UK, USA, and USSR.
The cleverness of the treaty comes from the way it allows all the signatories (and subsequent ones) to retain their territorial claims while suspending them indefinitely. Almost all the segments from the South Pole up to 60°S are contested by multiple countries.
Why is this all so important? Well, Antarctica is eleven percent of the Earth’s land surface (with eleven percent of the Earth’s minerals); the USA, for comparison, is just over six percent. It also holds ninety percent of the planet’s ice and seventy percent of its fresh water.
All of this has been protected for sixty-five years by just twenty-three pages of text.
After reading the treaty, I could not help imagining a novel where this simple agreement came under threat. What would happen if, on the morning of the AGM of a major petrochemical company in London, a faked photograph appeared in the newspapers of an exploration oil rig flaring gas south of 60°S latitude? What if at the same time the CEO’s daughter is kidnapped and the only demand was for him to acknowledge that oil had, indeed, been found just south of The Falklands?
The Government in London and those around the world would want to know if oil really had been discovered and if the Antarctic Treaty still held.
From these thoughts, The Tip of the Iceberg was born.
My CEO, Charles Yelland, eventually turns to a private detective to help find his daughter. Early in the writing process I called this character Mike Kingdom but when ‘he’ eventually appeared on Yelland’s computer screen ‘he’ was a woman … and a young American woman. I have genuinely no idea why this happened or where she came from – she appeared fully resolved and has sat on my shoulder for six books and the last twenty-six years telling me what to do.
When she came into my life, Michaela ‘Mike’ Kingdom was in her early thirties, a CIA analyst from Portland, Oregon, based in London. She had been damaged from an accident in which her husband had been killed; she had lost her hair and had a mangled left leg. Mike had probably never taken any prisoners but since the accident had developed a low tolerance level to … well, everything; this includes adherence to my plot outlines.
In The Tip of the Iceberg, the story races around the world from London to Mexico, from the south Atlantic to Trinidad and Norway. The disruption to the established order caused by the uncertainty over the oil discovery comes to a head at an environmental conference in Llandudno, north Wales, attended by world leaders. How the kidnap is resolved and whether oil was or wasn’t discovered will have to remain a secret revealed in the novel.
As to Mike? She develops through the series of standalone novels as does her boss, the Chief of Station in London, Leonard de Vries, with whom she has a love/hate relationship and who treats her like a gifted daughter.
Each novel deals, in the background, with a major current issue whether this is the Antarctic Treaty, narcotics smuggling, undersea cables, international gas pipelines, microchip factories or threats to world leaders. They are fast paced but, hopefully, are thought-provoking and have a splattering of wit and humour to lighten the load.
The latest thriller in the series, Jan the Dutchman, is published on April 14th and takes us full circle as the man who is rumoured to have killed Mike’s husband and wrecked her life reappears. Yet she is one of only two people who know that he was shot and killed. The other is Terry Bailey who fired the gun seven years earlier. She sets off on a journey to find her nemesis but only knows for certain that he is not called Jan and is not a Dutchman. It was never going to be easy.
But if her life had never been turned upside down in Holland, she would never have taken a sabbatical and never ended up being the private detective hired by Charles Yelland.
She would also not have played such a critical role in the evolution of the Antarctic Treaty.

David Jarvis’ JAN THE DUTCHMAN will be published on 14th April