I had already begun a new series, featuring Fran Varady, which was alternating with the original series. But if I failed to move them on, they risked becoming static figures endlessly appearing the same form, like reflections in a hall of mirrors. To change their relationship in any way would also change the basis on which they worked. But I soon found a needed a professional detective presence and introduced Alan Markby into the storyline – and he stayed.īut by book fifteen, I was facing a dilemma. In that first book I had set out with the intention of making Meredith Mitchell an amateur sleuth working alone. Ironically, at the outset I had not intended them to work as a pair. ‘I don’t believe she loves him!’ declared one audience member emotionally, after a talk. This growing closeness seized readers’ imaginations, many taking a personal interest. The characters developed and the relationship between them became closer. Eventually, the Mitchell and Markby series, as it came to be known, grew to fifteen books. Headline has grown and moved its location, first to the Euston Road and is now, under the Hachette umbrella, to a splendid block on the Victorian Embankment.Īs I climbed that narrow staircase in Great Titchfield St, I realised that my writing career would require more than one book! I needed to write a series, a daunting prospect. I have had the privilege of working with three distinguished editors: Anne Williams, Marion Donaldson and, currently, Clare Foss. I could not have imagined then, and I don’t suppose anyone else did, that I would still be writing crime novels for Headline twenty-five years later.
They bought my book and published it in 1991. Headline wanted to build up their crime fiction list.
My agent, Carole Blake, took the book to Headline publishers, then still a fairly new company, located in a quaint, cramped but delightful building in Great Titchfield Street.
(Over the years so many people have confided to me that they know real identity of ‘Bamford’ and each time they have named a different town.) The series is set around a fictional Cotswold town I called Bamford.
It featured a pair of detectives: Meredith Mitchell, a consular officer currently back home, and a Chief Inspector Alan Markby. In 1990 I wrote a crime novel called SAY IT WITH POISON.
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