Over the last three decades I’ve had more than thirty writing projects under my belt, one movie adaptation, a TV adaptation in the works, and a few more ideas are still up my sleeve. But I'm also living proof that you can start to write late, and you don’t need a university degree – just an appetite for books.

I left school at the age of seventeen and I didn’t begin to write novels until I was in my early forties. It’s been a busy and fascinating journey since then.

The most important advice I can offer anyone wanting to enter the weird world of writing is very simple: never, ever give up.

A Life in Writing

These days I divide my time between home in Kent and work and pleasure in Italy. It’s a long journey from the day I left school at the age of seventeen to become a cub reporter on the Scarborough Evening News, one of the smallest newspapers in the country. Over the next two decades I worked for The Times, Independent and Sunday Times as a journalist.

But the hankering to write fiction never went away. My first book Semana Santa, now reissued as Death in Seville, appeared in 1995 and was later turned into a movie with Mira Sorvino. Since then I’ve written more than thirty different books in various locations around the world.

In 2011, with my good friend A.J. Hartley, I branched into audiobook adaptations with Macbeth: A Novel, narrated by Alan Cumming. Now we’ve added Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: A Novel to the audio portfolio, this time narrated by Richard Armitage.

After writing eleven books set in Italy, nine featuring the young Roman cop Nic Costa, I went to Copenhagen for the three novel adaptations of The Killing series. After that I turned to Amsterdam with a series set around Pieter Vos, a detective who lives on the Prinsengracht canal. In 2016 I returned to the audio world with Romeo and Juliet: A Novel, once again narrated by the superlative Richard Armitage.

I returned to audio in 2019 for Last Seen Wearing, a full-blown drama set in New York for Audible. The same year saw the release of a new standalone too, Devil’s Fjord, set on the Faroe Islands and another Audible Original Shooter in the Shadows.

And then I returned to Venice, spending three years writing and researching The Garden of Angels, a panoramic story moving from the Nazi occupation of World War II to the modern day.

In the autumn of 2022, I stay in Venice too for the launch of a new ‘history mystery’ series with the launch of The Medici Murders, the first story featuring an amiable retired archivist, Arnold Clover. Now there’s a second Arnold, The Borgia Portrait, and for 2024 a new venture, based on the French TV detective Julien Baptiste.

My latest book is When The Germans Come, a mystery set in Dover in the scorching summer of 1940 when Hitler’s forces are massing across the Channel for the planned invasion, and a murderer is loose among the armed forces.

I live near Canterbury in Kent.