Please tell us a little about yourself and Moral Injury.

I am of Scottish heritage; my given name is Gaelic. I was born at the end of World War II, in what was then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. Like the main protagonist in Moral Injury, I was an immigrant (from the UK) and a newborn intensive care physician with PTSD. The book is set in the late 1980s when openly admitting that one suffered from a mental disorder was unlikely to enhance a medical career. I practiced medicine in the United States for over 40 years. During that time, I published widely in my medical field, including textbooks and research papers. I also edited a medical journal. After I retired, relearning the skills required to fulfill my lifelong ambition to write fiction took far longer than I anticipated. I owe my success to the contributions of many excellent writing tutors.

How did you choose the genre of Moral Injury?

Both my parents served in the British Royal Navy during the war. They first met while training at Bletchley Park in London and then met again in Colombo, where they were assigned as code breakers. Post-war, my father worked for MI6, and my mother was a librarian. She instilled in me my great love of reading. I particularly enjoy detective, spy, and other thrillers.

How did you develop your characters?

My characters are primarily based on people I worked with during my medical career in the United States. Some of their personalities evolved for me from the 1980s onwards, when components of American health care increasingly “corporatized” and focused on business efficiency and profitability over patient care. The other significant change that influenced how I developed my characters was the long-awaited recognition that optimal health care requires teamwork between mutually valued individuals trained in different aspects of patient care; the transport nurse, Ann Castle, and several other characters in the novel emphasize this point.

Was your storyline something that you envisioned from the beginning, or did you build/change it as you wrote your novel?

In retrospect, my storyline began to evolve in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall. When I began to write, I combined my first and what is now my second novel into one manuscript. Fortunately, I found an excellent editor who strongly advised me to split the work into two novels. Many more minor aspects of the storyline changed over the several years it took me to complete Moral Injury.

What are you working on now?

I am completing the sequel to Moral Injury, following the lives of many of the same characters but set in East and West Berlin shortly before the wall came down. Moral Injury will soon be available as an audiobook, and a screenplay will be written.

Portions of this Q&A were edited for clarity.