A collection of fourteen stories containing a broad cast of amusing characters involved in adventures which are by turns funny, ingenious and moving.
It took me six years to write these fourteen short stories. Because I have always had a job working in the urgent world of magazines, they were mostly written on holiday, which partly explains why nine of them are set abroad. But looking back at my longhand manuscripts, I now notice a peculiar thing. Few of the stories were actually written in the foreign countries in which they are set. I see that I was writing �The Man Who Loved Driving�, a story set in Turkey, from the improbable vantage point of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh. �The Big Game Hunters of Detroit�, which mostly takes place near Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, was written in Tuscany. �The Swaffham Madonna�, set in Tuscany, was written while driving across Turkey.
�Lucky Beggars�, which is a story about an English couple with small children on holiday in Sri Lanka, I wrote in Sri Lanka�s maximum security jail in Colombo, where I had been hilariously imprisoned on suspicion of being an international Tamil terrorist spy. I am still grateful to the Governor of Colombo prison who ensured that I was undisturbed for hours at a time so that I could concentrate.
None of the stories in this collection is wholly true. Most are inventions; the two or three stories with their genesis in real events have been so elaborately distorted that any resemblance, as they say, between a character in the book and any living person is almost entirely coincidental. This is especially true of the story called �How I Met My Wife�, which happily had an altogether different ending in real life.