This last observation was made by the social worker, Rachel Chaplin, with whom Resnick becomes involved, professionally and personally. It was my intention, I think, that there would be some kind of romantic involvement for Resnick in most of the books, each more or less foredoomed to end badly. Meantime, a relationship of a different kind was slowly building up between Resnick and the junior member of his team, Lynn Kellogg. Cold Light, (1994), the sixth in the series, ends [as, in my head, in began] with him describing her as “the daughter he had never had, the lover she would never be.”

Shows how little I knew.

Hand in hand with my decision that my hero would be a serving policeman was the assumption that, as such, he would be one—the central one—of a group of fellow officers, a team. In this I was influenced both by police procedurals I had read—Ed McBain, Joseph Wambaugh et al—and those I had seen on TV, early British series like Z Cars and later American ones like Hill Street Blues. In respect of the latter, Resnick would be the middle-management figure holding it all together—Frank Furillo but with a different tailor.

One great advantage, it seemed, of this kind of structure was that it would enable me to employ a multi-strand narrative and shift the focus of the story away from Resnick to the other members of the team. In so doing, not only could I introduce characters of differing age and gender and sexual orientation, I could both vary the pace and cover more narrative ground. For every chapter showing Resnick listening thoughtfully to, say, Thelonious Monk at home, I could have another in which one of his young DCs chases an armed villain across the roof tops.

The move from writing westerns to crime fiction had not been an instant one; in between I had written quite a bit of television drama—from BBC Classic serials such as the dramatization of Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns to episodes of popular crime series like Spender. Indeed, the last project I worked on before turning to Lonely Hearts was a six-part series I had originated about the probation service called Hard Cases. This was written about and largely filmed on location in Nottingham, where I was then living, and followed, as far as we were able, the Hill Street Blues pattern to a T. [I sat down with a stop watch and timed the sequences of that program exactly before planning my first scene-by-scene outline.]

Script writing had not only sharpened my use of dialogue and ability to cut between incidents and characters, it had made clear both the importance of place and the possibility—I’m tempted to say necessity—of presenting people and their actions within a social context.