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IF novelists need life experiences to draw on for their work, John Keeman isn't in short supply. He has had 37 jobs, from coal man to law lecturer, and enough anecdotes for an entertaining autobiography never mind a work of fiction. The 71-year-old from Irvine, who was born in Glasgow's Finnieston Street and grew up in the local area, was an HGV lorry driver, a bar manager and a taxi driver among other things before graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University at the age of 50 with a degree in law and public administration. "Hauling manure from sewage works in Clydebank to put out in the fields wasn't great," he remembers. "And in one of my jobs I was barred from Barlinnie. When I was an HGV driver we went there once a month to take away the residue after young offenders stripped copper cable. So we used to give them a packet of tobacco. "I was caught and given a dressing down. But they caught me again six weeks later and phoned up my boss and told him I was barred. I asked to get that in writing." John had no intention of following his father into the shipyards and lasted just three weeks in his first job as a tailor's assistant. He didn't fare much longer at a garage on Argyle Street in an escapade that made the newspaper at the time. "My job was to clean, wash and polish the cars and I drove a car through the window out into the street and hit a tram car," he recounts. "The Citizen newspaper turned up and I had to pose for a picture in front of the broken window." John says he was described as below average at school but only because he didn't like it and was rarely there. He finally found his way in with the world of education after going to university as a mature student. That's when he discovered his love for writing. "I went through a bad period of depression when I was about 30 and was in hospital. When I was trying to get myself back on my feet and get back to work I found writing was a help, it was therapeutic," he says. "And then when I went to university I was writing all the time." It was the real-life wartime memories of a friend's father that formed the basis of recently published The Italian Connection, his first novel. Tapping into theories on reincarnation and mental illness, it follows the story of George Giles who wakes up in a hospital bed in the 21st century and his last memory is as a soldier in Italy at the end of the Second World War. The plot thickens when it becomes clear his memories belong to one man and his body to another – serial killer Peter Hunter who was, until recently, detained at Broadmoor Hospital. "I have always been interested in scientific and religious people. I can't get my head around the idea that scientists can also believe in God, that makes absolutely no sense to me," says John. "Life to me seems to be energy and you can't really kill energy off, it has to go somewhere. So the idea was really if that is true and a dead person's energy becomes another living person, then what happens if there is a screw up in the middle? The answer is in the book. "Peter Hunter is actually the reincarnation of a guy called George Giles, who died in Italy at the end of the Second World War, and that's where the Italian connection comes in. "And there is the idea that if the state can no longer treat you and you are a convicted criminal then people will argue that you should be released. "So all these ideas about religion and God and science, and thinking, what are we at the end of the day? We're just skin and bone? I can't subscribe to the idea that there is some guy sitting on a cloud up there looking after us but then I can't subscribe either to the idea that death is the end. That doesn't make any logical sense to me. "I know the philosopher Thomas Hobbes said man's life is nasty, brutish and short, basically it is no more than birth, copulation and death, but that's philosophers for you, the most depressing people you can meet. There has to be something and what it is I have no idea." George Giles was actually the father of a friend, who served in the Second World War and parts of the book about his army years are true. Unlike the fictional soldier, George died when he was 82, leaving behind a treasure trove of letters from the friends and family of service personnel whom he helped come to terms with shellshock. The correspondence is now held at the Imperial War Museum in London.