Goodreads asked Doug Macdougall:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Doug Macdougall I have a long list of book ideas. The problem is to find the time to pursue them all. But some ideas percolate up to the top of the list, and the idea for 'Diamond Men,' a novel and my most recent book, was one of those. I had been fascinated by the story of Bre-X, a gold-mining company that in the 1990s claimed to have discovered the world's largest gold deposit in Indonesia. Its stock price soared, a few investors became millionaires - and then the whole thing collapsed and many more investors lost large amounts of money. It turned out to be a scam, the assay samples 'salted' with introduced gold. A great story for a geologist, but I didn't want to reproduce a true tale as fiction. But what about a scam in the diamond mining industry instead? Canada, my native land, experienced a diamond boom at the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty first. A good friend, an expert on diamonds, kept me up to date on the latest developments. Maybe it would be fun to write a novel about fraud in the diamond industry. Thus was born 'Diamond Men.'

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