I have been a voracious reader for as long as I can remember and my mum and dad were forever telling me off for reading under the bedclothes after lights out!

 

When I was ten years old, Mr Williams, my primary school teacher, would spend time every day reading to us and encouraged us to read anything and everything. Mr Williams introduced me to the fantasy world of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, the science fiction of John Wyndham and the crime novels of Agatha Christie.

 

At my local library in Highgate, London, I knew all the librarians by their first names. I would spend many hours in the quiet section reading book after book. As a child, I was officially allowed two library tickets, but as I was visiting the library on an almost daily basis to exchange my books, the librarians allowed me two privileges. First, they gave me six library tickets, the adult allocation, and second, allowed me to read books from the adult section of the library, forbidden territory to any child under fourteen. I am, and will always be, forever grateful to them for having encouraged my appetite for books and breadth of topics, though I am sure they just thought I was a nuisance! By the age of twelve, I had read all the Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Canon-Doyle, John Wyndham, John le Carré and Dick Francis books that they had on their shelves and lots of others besides.

 

Both my teachers and librarians helped trigger my imagination and I would spend hours making up stories about people that I saw on the bus, or tube, or met in the park. I loved English classes, my favourite topic was writing short stories and essays.

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Writing

I have, like many other people, always wanted to write a novel, well several actually, as I always have new ideas buzzing in and out of my head. Finally, a good few years ago now, I put fingers to keyboard, wrote a few short stories to get me started. You can find a couple of them here. Then I started writing the first in a series of three mystery crime novels, Duped. The fun part was writing it and deciding on the book cover, the hard part was editing it and the scary part was putting it out in the world for people to read.

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My furry friends