It’s what really happened, but it’s too unbelievable for fiction.Īfter conning the Barclays and the Tates, both Bourdin and my narrator settle into lives as their new selves. If I had tried to write something like this, most readers would – rightly – roll their eyes and throw the book aside.
But despite being seven years older than Nicholas, speaking with a heavy French accent, and having brown eyes and dark, thinning hair when Nicholas had been blue-eyed and blond, the Barclays accepted him and brought him home to Texas. Two years before he had spoken about his scams on French television. In reality, when Nicholas Barclay’s sister went to Spain to see her missing brother, the person she was confronted with was this:įrederic Bourdin, a Frenchman widely known as “the Chameleon.”Īt the time he impersonated Nicholas, he was twenty-three and had been posing as orphaned teenagers across Europe for years. Danny went missing so long ago, when he was only ten, that it would be hard to know what exactly he would look like at sixteen, and the boy in front of her had the same color hair and eyes as her brother and the same birthmark on the back of his hand. In my novel, when Daniel’s older sister Lex goes to Canada to see the boy claiming to be her brother, it’s easy to understand how she could be fooled by the con artist in front of her. (In my story, Nicholas and Patrick are the names of Daniel’s two brothers.) He was thirteen when he went missing, and he was only gone for three years before he was miraculously discovered in a foreign children’s care home.īut not just over the border in Canada. The real Daniel Tate was Nicholas Patrick Barclay. Soon he’s going home with the Tates to begin a new life, not realizing that Daniel’s family has secrets even darker than his own.
The lie is only supposed to be a temporary fix, but it quickly snowballs out of his control. To get himself out of a bind at one of these shelters, he claims that he’s actually a sixteen-year-old named Daniel Tate who was kidnapped in California six years before. He feels cared for in these places and prefers them to adult shelters or sleeping on the street. In Here Lies Daniel Tate, a Canadian con artist a little past his eighteenth birthday poses as a younger boy in order to scam his way into shelters and halfway houses for minors. They were simply too incredible to be believed in a fictional format. I say “adapt” because I knew there were lots of elements of the true story I would never be able to use.
When I first came across the true story that inspired my second novel Here Lies Daniel Tate, I knew instantly that I wanted to adapt it into a YA novel.
0 kommentar(er)
