A novel of the Kennedy family set EAST COAST USA and LONDON
Talking Location With Mark Grenside – USA and EUROPE
20th October 2026
#TalkingLocationWith… Mark Grenside, author of The Bastion – USA and EUROPE
The Bastion: real places, dangerous possibilities
What if a criminal could steal a list of people whose kidnappings were already insured? Not simply a list of wealthy targets, but the prospect of an insurer paying to secure their release if the worst were to happen.
That possibility lies at the heart of The Bastion, drawing on my years in kidnap-and-ransom insurance and my subsequent thirty-five years as a film and television producer.
The stolen names are concealed inside an apparently innocent still from a film being produced by my series hero, Marcus Riley. The photograph ends up in a Maltese bank whose vaults contain other images, each hiding a depositor’s deepest secrets.
ADAK ISLAND, USA
I like to blur the lines between fact and fiction, taking what is known and adding what might be possible. Travel often starts the process: a half-heard rumour, a battered plaque, something a waiter remembers his grandfather saying. Then comes the research, and eventually the mystery.
The Bastion opens far from the glamour of a Hollywood premiere. On remote Adak Island, in Alaska’s Aleutian chain, a second-unit director is filming establishing shots for movie Counting Thunder before the main production begins in Los Angeles. He is murdered.
The landscape provides more than an isolated crime scene. The islands’ history supplies one of the story’s threads. I enjoy finding places where the past offers something unexpected, then asking what a novelist might do with it.
POINT ROBERTS, USA
The trail next leads us to a geographical oddity. Point Roberts sits on the southern tip of a Canadian peninsula, but because the tip falls below the 49th parallel, a part belongs to the United States.
Surrounded by water on three sides, its only land border is with Canada. It struck me as an intriguing place to put someone under witness protection: somewhere the map itself might help a person disappear. For a thriller writer, that is rather more useful than a conventional border crossing.
Not every journey begins with a murder. Marcus and his partner take part in a treasure-hunt rally through France, a sequence drawn from my own experience.
CHÂTEAU DE SAVIGNY-LÈS-BEAUNE, FRANCE
For more than sixteen years, I competed in a London-to-Monte-Carlo rally called the Grand Tour, long before Clarkson’s programme. We hurtled through the countryside unravelling devious clues. The French locations, including the Château de Savigny-lès-Beaune and Flavigny, let me revisit that pleasure: travelling with your eyes open, knowing that the detail you overlook might be the one you need.
There is a particular satisfaction in solving a clue that has been sitting in plain sight. That pleasure has much in common with reading a thriller, where an apparently incidental detail can change your understanding of everything that has gone before.
After more than three decades in film and television, I know the work that goes into creating an illusion. Los Angeles lets me take readers behind that illusion, into a world where a production still can contain something its audience was never meant to see.
Marcus is producing a movie, but the danger surrounding it is not part of the script. A stolen list has been hidden in an image from his production. That collision between an invented story and a very real crime is what makes Hollywood matter in The Bastion.
VALLETTA, MALTA
Malta has been my home for ten years. Its history, architecture and fierce sense of identity continue to fascinate me, but it is the suggestion of things concealed that makes it such fertile territory for fiction.
In The Bastion, a bank safeguards photographs rather than simply money. What better setting for its secrets than an island whose past keeps inviting you to look beneath the surface?
UNDERGROUND VALLETTA, MALTA
Beneath Valletta lies another world of tunnels, water systems and wartime shelters. Above ground, you see the city; below it, you begin to appreciate how much a place can hide.
As a child, I was lucky enough to visit the set of every Sean Connery Bond film made at Pinewood. Later, I made films there myself.
In The Bastion, the baronial meeting room becomes the place where Marcus learns his star’s deep secret. A familiar room repurposed for an unfamiliar revelation.
ASPROMONTE MOUNTAINS, ITALY
Finally, we reach the wild Aspromonte Mountains of Calabria in Italy. This landscape provides my geographical bookend to Adak, another remote setting far from Hollywood.
The Aspromonte’s beauty coexists with its association with the ’Ndrangheta Mafia. That contrast matters to me: a place can invite exploration while its darker history suggests an altogether different kind of journey.
The journey has crossed continents, but the question remains close at hand: how much danger can a single innocent photograph conceal?
Mark Grenside
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