The blurb says that I have written fifteen mystery novels set in the south of England from the 1920s to the 1960s. However, my recent work has focused on the earlier part of the period. It is the 1920s and 30s where I feel most at home. I was born in 1951 My choice of detective fiction (and I am quite picky about the boundary between detective stories and the crime novel) was inevitable. John Creasey's Hammer the Toff was the first adult book that I read (when the village librarian allowed me to borrow the book with my pink 'Junior Reader' ticket). Since then, buying, selling, reading and writing detective novels has been an important part of my life. Most of all, I like talking about them. When, last month, a customer was browsing around my bookshop, we realised that we were detection enthusiasts and talked, for far too long, about the good and bad in the genre. Through that discussion, with surprising little disagreement, we moved towards defining what made a truly satisfying detective novel. We realised that readers who come to the genre in retrospect - like us - are probably more critical than those who had…
