An Andover author has described how writing his new novel was “very therapeutic” after being unable to find work during the pandemic.

Robert Hickman, an IT consultant, had just come to the end of a contract in February, and was preparing to travel before coronavirus restrictions started being introduced.

The 55-year-old said that while sitting at home, he decided to write the book, Six Idiots Witness A Murder, as a way of disciplining himself to get up, and “not be like a 19-year-old student.”

He wanted to “give people a bit of hope” in the pandemic by providing them with something that’s “easy to read and have a good old chuckle at.”

In his novel, a group of “IT geeks from Brighton” have to travel to Atlanta to solve a data problem, where they end up witnessing a murder. He told the Advertiser that the novel was a “murder mystery, but also an absurd comedy and a travelogue,” being inspired by Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

“It was interesting to see where the story would go,” he said. “It was half planned but some of it wrote itself. When I was trying to imagine how the characters would talk on a night out, I found myself being there.”

He has based the novel on his own experiences and those of friends, but blended with other ideas, and placed in different scenarios, to see how they would play out. For instance, he imagined how his grandfather, blended with a “Sheriff Pepper [from Live and Let Die]-type character,” would fit into the world that he had created.

Robert’s novel has already received its first five-star review, and he has already started work on two sequels. He has written 20% of the first sequel, which sees the characters become embroiled in an art theft back in Brighton, and has started planning the third entry in the series.

Six Idiots Witness A Murder is out now.