The Inspiration Behind The Stalker
I love tennis – the killer shots, stunning victories, crushing defeats. I try to get ahead on deadlines when Grand Slams are imminent so I can binge watch, and I’ve been to Wimbledon and the ATP finals several times. I’m completely uncoordinated with a racket, though, so it is firmly as a spectator.
In the nineties, Monica Seles and Steffi Graf were fierce rivals. I remember watching with complete horror as Seles was stabbed on court by an obsessive Steffi Graf fan at a match in 1993. Although Seles attempted a comeback a few years later, she never fulfilled the potential she so clearly had. Her physical injuries healed but the psychological damage remained.
The UK Office for National Statistics published results of a crime survey in England and Wales last year that one in five women over the age of sixteen have been a victim of stalking. For athletes in the public eye, online harassment and stalking are rife and still making headlines. Earlier this year, tennis star Emma Raducanu had a fan following her to tournaments around the world. She was so upset when she saw him in the crowd at a tournament in Dubai that she hid behind the umpire’s chair.
Reports in the news about stalking and harassment of tennis players and the attack on Seles were both part of the inspiration for my character, Lou Kingsley, in The Stalker. It’s the psychological impact of living through something like that I wanted to delve into, and how it could be manipulated years later.
Lou was a British tennis player who showed great promise, until her tennis career was derailed by a stalker. He left notes in places he shouldn’t have been able to access and followed her on tour, with tragic results. She left tennis behind while still in her teens and never went back.
When the story begins, Lou is a happily married mum of three and actively avoids thinking of her past. Then she finds a note on her car: if I were you, I’d go home. Now. This brings back the fear and trauma from over twenty years ago – the psychological scars she denies she has. She goes home and finds her husband in bed with another woman. She leaves him and goes to stay with her old doubles partner and friend, Iona, but the notes and other harassment continue.
You can pick up your copy of The Stalker here: https://mybook.to/StalkerTeriTerry