On Monday September 5th, 1994, at home, at the dining room table, I sat down to write. An hour later, I gave the first chapter to my wife. I asked, "Should I continue?" "Yes," she said. "I like it." So I wrote through the rest of the fall and winter, at home and at work, and by March 1995 I had finished the book. But it wasn't [Killing Floor]. Not exactly. The working title was Bad Luck and Trouble (a title I re-used much later in the series) and the story was about drug money.

A year or so earlier I had bought a book about money laundering--purely for its cover: it had a real dollar bill laminated into it. It said the illegal narcotics trade in the U.S. was all cash (obviously), and in a dry, statistical way said its annual value was twice the amount of all the cash in circulation within the fifty states. Which, I saw, meant the cartels had a serious, industrial problem. I worked out that four thousand tons of paper money had to be transported to the Caribbean banks--twice a year. The original manuscript was based around that theme. I typed it up on my daughter's new laptop, and printed it out on her slow inkjet printer, and bought a copy of The Writer's Handbook, which lists agents, and I sent a query letter and the first three chapters to Darley Anderson, in London, England.