INSPECTOR CARLYLE
My books are about Inspector John Carlyle, he's a policeman, working out of the Charing Cross police station in Central London.
The first Carlyle novel, London Calling was published in 2011 and there are now 4 books in the series with No.5 due in August 2013.
The original idea for the core storyline of London Calling came after reading A Florentine Death, by Michele Giuttari, who is a former head of the Florence Police Force. The protagonist perhaps owes most to Donna Leon’s iconoclastic Venetian detective Guido Brunetti but there is also more than a nod to Andrea Camilleri’s sicilian gumshoe Salvo Montalbano.
Overall, I would describe the novels as 'European crime fiction', full of shades of grey, moral ambiguities & unfinished business.
WHY LONDON?
Where better to set such a series than London? While there are many great crime series set around the continent – Venice, Florence, Ystad, Hamburg, Edinburgh and Oxford to name but a few - London, it seems to me, has not been used as a backdrop too often.
London, of course, is a sprawling metropolis of more than 650 square miles and more than 8 million souls, drawn from all corners of the globe. Carlyle’s London however is a much smaller geographic space, centred in and around the Covent Garden, between the financial district ('the City') and the shopping district (the West End).
As such, I am able to set much of the action amidst a range of familiar landmarks, including Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace.
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