Hugo & Josef (and not Ben).
Bonjour!
I am writing this blog on the eve of the release of Hugo & Josef and I’m just a little bit nervous about it… It’s been a year of trying new things. After ten ‘Investigates’ books I thought it was time for something different. But what? I didn’t really want to write a new series with all new characters but neither did I want to ‘just’ do the normal Hugo books forever. And then it came to me - I could extend the Hugo universe I had created and it would allow me to try something different.
The idea for a prequel came to me a long time ago and I have to admit I was talked out of it, primarily because the world of Hugo and Ben and their lives together in Montgenoux has its own set of ‘keen’ followers, so why rock the boat? The character of Hugo came to me in the summer of 2015 and he was pretty much fully formed. But he was damaged. We touched upon his backstory in the first book and a little bit more in each subsequent book. I always wanted to spend a little time exploring his past but was never really sure how to. However, like all of these books, once I thought about it, the story just came and before I knew it I was 100 pages in, then 200, then 300 and then finally I was typing FIN and the book was done.
I want you to know that I spent a great deal of time and thought on exploring a fifteen-year-old Hugo, especially after writing a forty-year-old one. They had to be the same and yet different. Young Hugo had to become old Hugo and he could only do that if whatever happened to him at fifteen would make the older one. There was only one way to do that. Find what changed him. The story itself came to me in the same way as they usually do. I ‘see’ the cover - in this case, two boys tied to a tree. From that image, it took me only a short while to see the story and how I would create a new world for Hugo, a world that would turn him upside down and make him become the older Hugo we all know and love. In one summer, the summer of 1995, Hugo fell in love for the first time and his life took a very sharp change of direction, sending him towards what would ultimately become his career.
I really hope you like the detour, especially because I am planning two more sequels (plus a special non-Hugo book, I’ll tell you more about that soon). The prequel trilogy takes Hugo from 1995 to 1998 and ends on the day of his eighteenth birthday when he became an adult and sets off from his staid life in Paris to a new slightly terrifying one. I’m excited about them and hope you will be too.
That’s about it for this blog, other than I would like to thank you for all your love, support and kind words. I wish you a happy and healthy new year and that we walk into a calmer, happier world in 2022.
Much love as always.
GXX