Tattoo is an origin story, but in it I don't just introduce Sutton Mills...the city of Bristol must also take a bow.

As a fan of crime fiction, I was overwhelmed and disheartened by the proliferation of the disorganised anti-hero that seemed to satisfy modern readers: the drunk, the man who can't successfully navigate a relationship, the man - or woman - so oblivious to their own condition its a wonder they aren't permanently tied to a Guide dog...but as a Detective, they excelled? It was a contradiction I found hard to reconcile.

So those frustrations and disappointments were poured into Tattoo, a disturbing - and some might say, lurid - tale of murder in a modern British city.

Sutton Mills was a response to these incomplete pariahs of modern detective fiction. The unique and incorruptible characters of the crime fiction of my youth had been seemingly borne out on the tide in the Bristol Channel, never to return. Sutton Mills harked back to a purer form of the detective character: a knight. And to make that even more apparent, I pitted him against an adversity that was his true opposite: a man who represented all that could go wrong with who he was, if he wasn't so principalled; a negative Sutton Mills.