My crime novel, The Twilight Hour was published by Serpents Tail in July 2006.

In the mid nineties I published two slightly futuristic crime novels,
1993 The Lost Time Café London: Virago (trans: German).
1995 Poisoned Hearts London: Virago.

But The Twilight Hour is set in the past: in the great freeze of early 1947 in Austerity London and Brighton. In retrospect the period seems the ideal setting for a crime novel. It was an era of peculiarly grim murders (for example there was the 'Brides in the Bath' murderer who dissolved the bodies of his victims in acid) in a period when bomb sites, ration books and shortages made for a bleak backdrop to the bohemian lives I write about. It's partly a homage to the films of Robert Hamer (Pink String and Sealing Wax, Dead of Night) and the London film noir, Night and the City. Brighton Rock brilliantly depicts that seedy glamour of that period too.

The postwar 'Austerity' period in Britainalso interests me because in many ways it seems so like today. Then, as now, there was tremendous political uncertainty and huge fear of the world situation. Then it was communism and the Cold War; now it is terrorism, but the general atmosphere was quite similar. The big difference between then and now was that today we are swamped in consumerism, whereas then there were shortages of absolutely everything. The result of that, though, was that people had more time for personal relationships; neither shopping nor the 'long hours culture' of work played such a big role as they do today.

I'm now writing a sequel.