Where did the idea for VICAR come from?

During the COVID lockdowns, I was fortunate enough to have woodland and open fields close to home. Walking the dogs became a daily escape, a chance to get outside, clear my head and enjoy a degree of freedom at a time when so much of ordinary life had been taken away.

That freedom also made me think about people who didn’t have the same opportunity. My wife works on a hospital ward where the patients cannot simply decide to leave. For them, being confined to one place was not a temporary consequence of lockdown but part of everyday life. The contrast stayed with me: I could step into the woods whenever I wanted, while others could experience the outside world only from a distance.

I began wondering whether technology could offer people in that position something more meaningful than a television screen or a conventional virtual-reality headset. What might come after VR? Could technology eventually reproduce not just what another person could see and hear, but everything they experienced, the movement, physical sensations and even the emotions?

From that question came the idea of Vicarious Reality, or VICAR: a full sensory system that would allow someone to experience the world through another person. For people who were housebound or living with limited mobility, it could be transformative. They might climb mountains, visit distant cities or feel the exhilaration of experiences their circumstances would otherwise place beyond reach.

It was an optimistic idea, at least initially.

Then the aspiring crime writer in me began asking the inevitable question: if a technology like that existed, how would someone corrupt it?

I had always wanted to write a screenplay, and VICAR gave me the idea I needed. I turned that initial premise into a lean, fast-moving script and entered it into the Los Angeles International Screenplay Competition. To my delight, it reached the quarter-finals. That result gave me confidence that the central idea worked, but it also left me wondering whether there was more to the story than a screenplay could contain.

So I took on the rather daunting task of turning it into a full-length novel.

A screenplay is deliberately economical. It provides action, dialogue and the essential visual details, leaving actors, directors and designers to supply much of the texture. A novel asks the writer to provide all of it. Suddenly, I had to move beyond what the characters did and said and explore what they thought, remembered and feared. The world needed greater depth, the investigation needed room to develop, and Òran Black and Sam Cartwright had to become fully realised people rather than names on a page.

Expanding that lean script into a novel was far more demanding than I had anticipated, but it also gave the story room to become what it needed to be. The technology became more believable, the consequences became darker, and the characters developed lives that could continue beyond a single investigation.

What began during quiet walks through the woods became Dark Vicar: a story about an invention capable of giving people extraordinary freedom, and what might happen when it fell into the hands of someone who saw an entirely different kind of possibility.