I’m British, born in South Africa in 1973, and live with my wife in a village in the East Riding of Yorkshire.  Linda and I were married in Barbados in 2004; she runs her own personal training business, McFit.   

I finished school with the intention of writing, realised that I didn't have very much to write about, and subsequently spent eleven years working in law enforcement.  I began my first novel, an untitled sword and sorcery epic, in 1990, while I was waiting for university to start.  When I reached fifty pages and about twenty thousand words, I made the fatal error of going back to revise.  The result was that instead of progressing with the story, I wrote twenty versions of the first page, lost heart, and gave up.  It took me fifteen years to reach novella length again.  I had no idea at the time that having the confidence to finish the first draft of a project is the main stumbling block encountered by new writers.  I wish I’d kept my first manuscript, because from what I remember it wasn’t all bad, even if I drew a little heavily on Lord of the Rings and Dragonlance.

My first publication was a crime fiction novella, The Secret Policeman, in 2005, and fourteen years in the making; the sequel, The Secret Service, took six months from conception to completion, and was much better received.  They were both written without a target audience or marketing strategy in mind, and became labours of love, fraught with the usual problems associated with – first, small presses – and then, print-on-demand publishing.  The saga ended well, however, as both novellas and the collection of short stories linking them, The Secret Agent, were bought by Ulverscroft in 2007.

My first novel, THE ARCHITECT OF MURDER, is due for publication by Robert Hale in December 2008.  At present, I'm hard at work on the second.