When I thought about writing a detective novel, a police procedural, I wanted to write something different. I didn’t want to write about a divorced police detective with a drinking problem – I’ve already written too many characters with drinking problems – and I didn’t want it to be a character I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing – a female police detective, for example, because I don’t actually know what it’s like to be a woman. Actually, I don’t know what it’s like to be a police detective, but then most of the people who read books don’t know what it’s like to be a police detective, so it’s fine to use imagination and a bit of research.

I already had the idea in my head that the detective was going to be a chief inspector, and that his surname was going to be Woods – a nod to my mother, who sadly died a few weeks before I started to write the book, and whose maiden name was Woods. I decided that he was returning to work after a hiatus, so I needed a reason for that hiatus. I don’t really touch too much upon it in this first book – I intended for “Genesis” to be the first in a series of novels featuring my detective – but there are hints he was off work for a long time with post traumatic stress disorder. But that couldn’t really be much of a unique selling point for my detective, so I decided upon something else. In this case, Detective Chief Inspector Woods is a religious man, not averse to quoting passages from the Bible, if only to wind people up. And that was another point to his character. Woods is like an exaggerated version of Inspector Morse, a police detective version of Doctor House. He speaks inappropriately, and he does it to get a rise out of his suspects. Reining him in is Detective Sergeant Jo Mackenzie – Sarge, as he calls her – who frowns at his bad behaviour, and does her best to keep him out of trouble. Woods is from Liverpool, he hates The Sun newspaper, and he’s a fan of the Rolling Stones, a band his father introduced him to when he was a child. In fact, his family refer to him as Ronnie, as in Ronnie Wood, the Stones’ guitarist.

“Genesis” is just that. The genesis of a new character, returning to work in a new police station, where nobody knows him and where he has to find his way amongst the politically correct and find a new religious community in which to worship. But were any of those things unique selling points? A chief inspector with PTSD, religious with a love for the Rolling Stones? Well, what type of cases does he investigate? Murders, of course, or serious crimes. And as a twist, I decided that the murder mysteries should be inspired by real life cases. In the case of “Genesis”, a young girl goes missing from her house after her parents left her at home alone in order to go to a party round their neighbour’s house. The influence, of course, comes from the Madeleine McCann case of a few years ago, where the three-year-0ld girl went missing on the 3rd May 2007 in Portugal after she was left alone in the family’s holiday apartment. I hasten to add that other than the pretext that case offered, the plot line I created has nothing to do with the subsequent investigation into Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. My plot does not allow for speculation as to what might have happened to Madeleine. Also, I don’t want to seem mercenary, but real-life cases are interesting, and I felt it would be intriguing to put a fresh spin on reality. I’m already halfway through writing the second book in the series, “Exodus”, which centres around the murder of a footballer’s ex-wife and her male friend. I’ll let you guess the inspiration for that one.

As I felt that “Genesis” and the character of Detective Chief Inspector Woods was a shift in a new direction for me, I decided that I would write it under a pen name – Shaun Martin (which, I’ll let you into a little secret, is actually my real name) – though it didn’t generate the interest that Robert Galbraith’s “Strike” novels did. I’ll let you into another secret. The first Robert Galbraith book I read was “Troubled Blood”, and I was halfway through that before I glanced at the copyright page one night and realized that it was actually written by J.K. Rowling, another writer whose sales I could do with being a few million copies behind.

So that’s “Genesis”, a detective novel which didn’t sell particularly well, but which features a character I like and I enjoy writing. So there will be follow-up novels, and I will endeavour to press as many copies as I can into the hands of as many readers I can find.