‘I’m a psychic and I’ve been sent a message about nuclear war. It’s coming soon and I need you to help me with this book so that we can stop it happening.’

As an opening line, it was hard to beat. We ghostwriters get some unusual requests, but this one was in a category of its own. Intrigued, I got in touch to find out more.

Denise turned out to be funny, warm, chatty and knowledgeable. And yes, she was a psychic and deadly serious about the nuclear war warning.

‘Those on the other side won’t let me rest,’ she said. ‘They keep saying there’s time to pull back from the brink but we have to act now.’

Strangely Denise’s main contact on the ‘other side’ was her former mother-in-law, a larger than life (and death) woman who convinced Denise that she was genuine by telling her what her husband, Michael, had got up to when he was a little boy. Denise put the claims to Michael, who laughed and confirmed that his mother was absolutely right.

Denise had not been one of those ‘gifted prodigy’ children. Until she was in her thirties she was a hairdresser in a small northern town who had won a hairdressing award but showed not a glimmer of psychic ability. Or interest.

‘I never even thought about it,’ she said. ‘Until one day, some years ago, I had a vison of a nuclear explosion in horrific detail. And, as I stood in my kitchen, frozen in horror, there she was, my deceased mother-in-law, whispering in my ear and telling me that I had to tell the world when and where it would happen and what we needed to do to stop it.’

‘It’s been a burden, to be honest,’ she sighed. ‘I mean, who wants that kind of responsibility?’

So why did those on the other side choose you, Denise?

‘No idea,’ she said. ‘I’ve asked myself the same thing. Why not get someone famous or powerful to do it? They chose me. And they chose you too.’

Me?

‘Yep. They told me they want you to do the book.’

And so, slightly rattled by this command from who knows whence but charmed by the irony of getting my orders from a ghost, I got to work.

Denise, it turned out, had many, many extraordinary stories that illustrated her remarkable ability. When called upon she would go up to people in cafes or restaurants or even the street and give them messages which, unfailingly, turned out to be accurate.

Like the time she told a fellow diner in a restaurant that he had just been offered a job and was struggling to decide whether to take it. ‘Turn it down,’ she said. ‘In a couple of weeks you’ll be offered the job you really want.’

The diner, like all the people in Denise’s account, later corroborated the story. ‘I was stunned when this strange woman came over to me,’ he said. ‘But she was right. I said no to the job I was unsure about and two weeks later I got my dream job.’

There were dozens of examples, some of them extraordinarily detailed and complex. Whatever Denise was doing, and whoever was giving her information, it was spot on, to the point of being uncanny and inexplicable. Which made it hard not to take her nuclear warning seriously.

So we wrote her book and she self-published it, because publishers scoffed. Denise didn’t mind that because she’d been told that the book was a stepping stone to bigger things. Which duly turned out to be the case, when Hollywood came calling and a lot of big cheese types began to take an interest. Until eventually, after a bit of a tussle between film companies, her book was optioned by Netflix. The film is in production.