There's a melancholy sense of things lost in the shabbier British seaside towns; of comfortable failure and better times long gone.
My bedroom was filled with reading material: books salvaged from dustbins, books borrowed from friends, books with missing pages, books found in the street, abandoned, unreadable, torn, scribbled on, unloved, unwanted and dismissed. My bedroom was the Battersea Dogs' Home of books.
Broadly speaking, there are two approaches to crime: the realistically detailed police procedural, usually grim and downbeat, and the more left-field, joyous theatre of ideas in which past masters once specialised. Knowing that I would never be able to handle the former, I set about reviving the latter.
My father Bill had a problem with Christmas. Although he appears in old photographs to possess a whippy, muscular frame, he was actually a frail man and usually managed to cause some kind of drama just before the festivities began.
The queen of crime, Agatha Christie, was always more concerned about the clockwork cleverness of the plot, never the investigator.
I left school on a wet Thursday afternoon, found a room in a shared house in North London, and started my first job on the following Monday as a courier for an advertising agency.
