From Pain Comes Gain

Fans of Robert Wilson, whose third novel featuring Seville’s Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, The Hidden Assassins, is already available in Britain and due out in U.S. bookstores come November, will want to read a new, appreciative profile of this author in The Australian. During the course of Wilson’s encounter with the newspaper reporter, he tells about how a long-ago car accident, which cost him a rugby career, also led him to develop the Spanish detective whose adventures are now making him a literary star.

As The Australian explains:

Then came his pile-up. [Wilson] was a passenger in a putative brother-in-law’s car, and he remembers hearing two paramedics “decide ‘not to bother with that one because he’s gone’. ‘I'm alive,’ I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t make a sound. I was terrified I was going to die because I couldn’t get their attention.”

After a long recovery, he went from being a sport-centric jock “to making different friends, being more open and getting an insight into a different world entirely. In a way, I’ve used Javier Falcón as a way of talking about what happened to me, how my vision was opened up by a traumatic experience. Experiences like that either make you or break you.”

For Wilson, it was clearly the former course.