How local author Alan Mackenzie turned an airport wait into a thriller trilogy
Most people stuck at Schiphol Airport probably buy another coffee, read the paper or stare hopefully at the departure board.
I found myself wondering what would happen if you travelled back in time and killed your father before you were born.
As one does.
At the time, I was working in the Netherlands as an Instrument Engineer, part of a career in the petrochemical and gas industries that lasted around 40 years. Perhaps that explains it. Faced with one of fiction’s great paradoxes, the engineer in me did not simply want to accept it. I wanted to know whether it could be solved.
That question eventually became Time’s Up and, rather unexpectedly, three novels.
These days I live in Surrey and write under the pen name Alan Mackenzie. I also spend a couple of days a week at Tilgate Forest Golf Club with the Seniors Section, a bunch of 60- to 80-year-old youngsters.
I grew up in the Royal Albert Dock area of East London, the oldest of two sons. My mother was a seamstress and my father an ex-paratrooper who became a bricklayer. As a boy, I was probably more interested in painting, writing and design than becoming a professional footballer like most of my friends.
That need to understand how things worked, design them and construct them eventually led me into engineering.
It also followed me into writing. Once I started thinking about the mechanics of time travel, I could not simply accept the paradoxes and move on. I wanted to know whether there might be logical ways around them.
Those thoughts became Time’s Up.
At its heart, Time’s Up is a conspiracy and espionage thriller. People are disappearing, records are being altered, and investigator Samantha Whittaker begins uncovering links between her own organisation, the government and something operating in the shadows. Time travel sits inside that story as the mechanism behind the conspiracy rather than being the whole point of the book.
I originally intended it to be a standalone novel.
That did not go entirely to plan.
I became too attached to the characters, and there were too many other ideas about time, cause and effect and paradoxes that I still wanted to explore. One book became two, then three and Time’s Up became the first part of The DOMINION Trilogy.
I am not one of those writers who sits down with a vague idea and simply waits to see where the characters take me.
Arghh! Anarchy.
My engineer’s brain would explode in blind panic.
Before I start properly, I need to know where the story begins, where it ends and what happens in between. I build a chapter-by-chapter synopsis first, which becomes the skeleton of the novel.
My editing process is similarly old-fashioned. I write the initial draft on a computer, print it out, then make revisions and notes by hand with a fountain pen. I type the changes back in, print it again and start over.
I need to feel the pages.
These days I tend to write either with my feet up at home or at a particular table in my local pub, especially during winter when the log fire is burning.
Writing is still the solitary part. Publishing, apparently, is not.
My son Tony has taken a rather active role in dragging me into the modern world of book promotion and has been helping with the publishing, design and promotional side of relaunching the trilogy. New editions, new covers, audiobooks, websites, social media and all the other things that apparently come with being an author in 2026.
I’m still learning.
Golf provides a rather different challenge. I am relatively new to it, still very much a high handicapper and currently engaged in what is proving to be the surprisingly difficult task of breaking 100.
The great thing about golf is that one good shot is enough to convince you you’re Rory McIlroy.
The great thing about the next hole is that it reminds you that you are, in fact, Maurice Flitcroft.
There is another annual commitment that requires rather more forward planning.
Every autumn I put the razor away and start growing a proper white beard ready for my December appearances as Father Christmas at the Star Inn in Felbridge.
Christmas comes earlier every year, especially if you’re Santa and need to grow the beard before the big day.
So I seem to have ended up with a rather odd combination of interests: retired engineer, thriller writer, novice golfer and seasonal Father Christmas.
But the engineering part has never really gone away. When I write, I still want the machinery underneath the story to work. The plot needs structure, the twists need purpose and however unusual the premise becomes, I want the reader to feel that someone has thought through how it all fits together.
And no, I still do not think I will ever completely stop revising my own work.
I once said that if I were stranded on a desert island I could not take one of my own novels with me because I would spend the entire time editing it.
But eventually even an engineer has to stop tinkering.
For now, at least, I’ve put the fountain pen down.
More than a decade after Time’s Up was first published, I have returned to it, substantially revised it and given the whole trilogy a new lease of life.
The revised third edition of Time’s Up launches on 29th October 2026 as the first book in The DOMINION Trilogy.
