'All good jazz guitarists know that Django was the greatest, a man who could pluck a new phrase out of the air as if it had always been there, like a shining star in the musical cosmos.  His two fingers seemed to breathe melody.

'I saw Django's partner, Stephane Grappelly, twice.  Quite simply, he defined jazz violin, with effortless grace.  When I saw him on stage in his nineties, his music seemed to lift him into the air like an angel.'

'The significance of another discovery only became apparent in recent years.  Returning from Lourdes to Cambridge in '77, I was lucky enough to find exactly the right guitar, an authentic replica of the type of Parisian instrument which Django and Joseph were playing in the thirties.  My guitar was hand-built in a historic workshop in Japan, and approved by the original thirties designer, Mario Macaferri.  I couldn't believe my eyes, seeing it hanging in the window of Ken Stevens' music shop.  There was just enough money left over from my summer job in Lourdes.

'It is a very demanding instrument, and for decades I could hardly play it.  Fast approaching fifty years old, it is something of a treasure.  It sounds just like the originals made nearly a hundred years ago, and now its legend is preserved on the pages of a novel.'

'There was no way of knowing that one day a chance meeting in Lourdes and a lucky find in Cambridge would become part of a story about two musicians, because in the seventies my mind was set on writing only non-fiction books about mountains and wildlife.

'So much serendipity lies behind these three novels, most of it true.  Sometimes the network of connections stretches across the centuries.'

'Most of my Lourdes friends, and some here by the Tweed, tell me that things only happen because they were meant to.  I am a feet-on-the-ground realist, but I do sometimes wonder if they have a point!'

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