Writers have generally portrayed the city as a rumbustious, lively place with a good kicking about as close as the nearest pint of Shippo’s, and the area as a whole has nurtured a reputation for roughness and violence. Think of Alan Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, or, further back, the early short stories of D. H. Lawrence, set in the small mining communities to the west of the city [where I began my teaching], in which it was normal for the wives and children to hide under the kitchen tables when the colliers were on their way home from the pub after getting paid.

More recently, Nottingham has acquired an unwanted and, to some degree, unwarranted reputation as the murder capital of Britain, thanks to a number of high-profile murders occurring within a short period, over-stretching the resources of the local constabulary, and too many well-publicized instances of gun crime fuelled both by the drug trade and rivalries between young residents of various inner city housing estates.

Rightly or wrongly, I felt that in writing about Nottingham, I was giving the Resnick novels a setting that I could portray with a degree of knowledge and conviction and that Resnick himself could also be seen to know and understand. And love. Warts, as they say, and all.

There’s one last question about Resnick I have to address, one which I’m often asked: how much, if any, of him is me?

If we acknowledge the fact that, like each of my characters, he comes from some mixture, peculiar to me, of observation and imagination, then the answer is very little. In simple terms, I don’t live off sandwiches or have four cats, I am not childless and rarely spill food down my tie. Not that, Detection Club dinners aside, I ever even wear a tie.

But his Nottingham is, or has been, mine. For years I walked across the city center, mid-morning, to take my place at the same coffee stall.

My first real experience of listening to Billie Holiday came when shuffling through a pile of old vinal 78s belonging to a school friend’s uncle—”I Cried For You” by Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra, with Billie Holiday, vocal refrain. There amongst the Earl Bostic and early Duke Ellington and Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. For Resnick, in Cutting Edge, (1991), this became an occasion when, as a boy, he visited the house of an uncle who worked as a tailor—with thumbs like sheet metal and fingers like silk—who has visited America and returned with a bundle of recordings that the young Resnick pored over and listened to with wonder.