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My criminals display good as well as bad qualities and my policemen (Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles in particular) blur the boundaries between good and evil. This gives me more material to play around with. The contrasting qualities in character mean, I hope, that they’re more interesting. It certainly makes them more interesting to me.

I’d like to think I have a comic view of society and mankind in general and that I sometimes get this across. Yes, sometimes the humour is meant to come from the sight of people struggling towards an objective, even an ideal, and, of course, making a muck of it.

I introduced Harpur and Iles in You’d Better Believe It, which I wrote as a one-off. There were quite a few rewrites and there was some difficulty in selling it at the beginning. I wasn’t altogether confident about it. And it didn’t get many notices at first. But I wrote another book about the same characters, The Lolita Man. And that got enormous coverage and reviews. And that, I suppose, then prompted me into thinking I must stick with this for a while, at least. And so then I went on and wrote Halo Parade, and the series grew from there. It’s now been running for more than thirty novels, published at a rate of roughly one a year.

I think that it was Len Deighton who said that he likes to get something on every page that makes the reader smile or possibly laugh. It’s a continual job. You’ve got to keep on making the book amusing page by page, not overall.

I like aggressive humour. The kind that quite often comes, on the police side, from upending order. And on the crooks’ side, the humour springs from their aspirations to be businessmen: serious, sometimes even moral people. The way they talk is at variance with how really they are. The humour in that contrast usually works well and suggests what I’m always trying to suggest: that we’re on the edge of chaos all the time.

Iles is the more complicated of the two lead characters. He’s basically a good cop. But very basically. He never takes money; he’s not bent in that sense. He’s ruthless in what he does, and sometimes acts in the way the criminals act in order to catch the criminals. In some ways, he’s also weak. He’s unattractive to his wife, who has an affair both with Harpur and one of the other cops, Francis Garland. And Iles knows this and it drives him berserk.

Harpur represents the proper, nose-clean side of policing – most of the time, although he will take short cuts. Iles constantly mocks him for being too conventional and too timid. But quite often Harpur is the one who gets things put right, who actually runs the place behind Iles’s back to some extent. He neutralises Iles. And he appears to work his own way, and sometimes actually does work his own way, and succeeds where Iles’s methods might not.

Somebody asked me, in an interview in France, if I was Harpur. ‘Oh, no!’ I said. ‘I’m Panicking Ralph!’ I understand people who get scared, which he does. I understand people who have crazy kind of ambitions. He wants to turn his rather seedy club, The Monty, into something like the Athenaeum in London, which is preposterous. But, we all have those ambitions and they are in some ways poignant and in some ways comical, so that I can get a fair number of laughs out of Ralph and similarly out of the other big dealer, Mansel Shale, who pretends to a kind of social style.

The technique of the books is to give qualities to people that are a surprise in them. Harpur and Iles work, if they do work, as fiction characters because they are not sergeants and constables, they are extremely high-ranking cops who don’t always play by the book. So there is kind of a shock element in that. Of course, I’m not the first or only crime writer to show a cop (or cops) with faults. Perhaps Iles drifts closer to the outrageous, though, and he is always beautifully dressed – uniform or civvies.

A key question for authors with police officers as protagonists concerns how much attention they devote to describing police procedure realistically. John Wainwright was a serving police officer for many years before becoming a prolific and successful crime writer and, from 1983, a member of the Detection Club. His inside knowledge of the lives and work of detectives gives his books a strong flavour of authenticity.

Conversely, Colin Dexter achieved global success with his books about Inspector Morse without troubling too much about the detail of police procedure. The millions of readers who love Ruth Rendell’s books about Reg Wexford and P. D. James’s series about Adam Dalgleish are not unduly concerned about technical minutiae. The strength of the characters, settings, and plots offer more than adequate compensation.

Similarly, Marjorie Eccles’ prime focus is on telling a story about interesting people. In the course of a career lasting over thirty years, she has written a wide range of books; contemporary and historical crime series as well as stand-alones and many short stories. Like Mark Billingham, Bill James, Colin Dexter, Ruth Rendell, and P. D. James, she has seen her police detective brought to life on television.