Since the first Nic Costa title, A Season for the Dead, appeared in 2003 the series has grown a book a year, and spread to some twenty different languages around the world including Japanese, Thai, French, Spanish and Italian. It has won multiple plaudits including, most recently the American Library Association award for Best Mystery of 2008 for the sixth book, The Garden of Evil.

I never expected any of this, trust me. In fact when I wrote A Season for the Dead I honestly believed my career as a writer might well be over.

After I wrote Lucifer’s Shadow – now rereleased in the UK as The Cemetery of Secrets – I found myself out of contract with my then publisher. Lucifer was the first book I ever set in Italy. I loved writing it, and edited the final draft in a little apartment in Rome, simply because I felt like being in Italy, though not in Venice where it was set.

I’d visited Rome a couple of times before as a journalist. But on this occasion I was there for a whole week and the place took my breath away. I determined to set the next book there, enrolled at a language school to study Italian and tried, as best I could, to see the city through the eyes of Romans.

Nic Costa came out of knowing what I didn’t want to write: a conventional crime character. In other words someone who was melancholic, alcoholic, middle-aged, dour, divorced…. you get the picture. Instead I wanted someone full of integrity and enthusiasm, young, a little naive, someone who was looking for something. Enter the young agente who’s grown steadily over the years to become the character he is today, now surrounded by a mature and familiar cast of regulars.

That was the serendipitous path that led to A Season for the Dead. With my customary sense of great timing I managed to deliver to my then publisher on September 11, 2001. He rejected it quite harshly as ‘unpublishable’. A few months later I was in a new home, the enthusiastic hands of Pan Macmillan, with a new editor, Maria Rejt, who told me what I wanted to hear: this wasn’t a standalone novel at all, it was a new series.

And here we are. Which, for those of you trying to write yourselves, demonstrates two eternal facts about books. First, this can be a very odd business indeed. And second, they don’t grow on trees. You have to go out there and chase them down. Books are about life, and if you don’t experience much of that you’ve got no stories to tell.