How I became a crime author

I  wrote my first novel at the age of eleven, an adventure story in the style of Enid Blyton, who was my great inspiration. It was borrowing an Enid Blyton book from my lovely little local library in Portsmouth that ignited my love of reading and of writing.  From about the age of seven or eight I too wanted to be a writer. I was always writing stories and plays, the latter of which I’d stage with my friends and brothers in the garage at our family  home in Portsmouth.

However, life, marriage, paying the bills and forging a different career took precedence. I worked for the civil service in the jobcentre and benefit office network, where I met some fascinating people and had some hairy threatening experiences!  I went from there to undertaking an HNC in Business Studies with Marketing at night school and from there a post grad. Diploma in Marketing, again at night school until, after working in sales and marketing for some years, I started my own marketing and PR Consultancy.  This I ran successfully for many years and loved it. However, that itch to write fiction was still there and I began to put pen to paper (and typewriter) in my spare time.

I began by writing historical sagas. They were all rejected, and rightly so, because at that stage I was still an apprentice, learning my craft. Over time I found that a criminal element kept creeping into these sagas, and I also discovered that I preferred to write from the male point of view. It was a while before it dawned on me that I should be writing crime novels with a male protagonist. It should have been pretty obvious because ever since Enid Blyton I have devoured crime and thriller novels for years. But the time spent writing historical sagas wasn't wasted. I learnt a lot along the way. 

It took me eighteen years to get published and even then there have been ups and downs along the way. Now, I am delighted to be published by the largest independent publisher in the UK, Joffe Books, and I am thrilled that I have twenty-seven crime novels published with two more to be published in 2024 - Inspector Ryga number five in the series and Detective Inspector Andy Horton number eighteen.  I'm currently writing Art Marvik mystery number five and, God willing and a fair wind, that will take me to the grand total of thirty published crime novels by 2025!

I still love writing and creating new plots for my lovely heroes to solve and hope to continue to do so for a very long time.

My thanks to all my readers and to the great team at Joffe Books for making this possible.