I nearly had a novel published when I was younger, but hard luck! Instead, I graduated in law, worked as a lawyer in private practice, as a senior crown counsel in Hong Kong, and then as a senior executive at British Gas.

I had my first novel, a modest thriller entitled A Smell of Fraud published in 1976. Although I was always writing something, the pressures of earning a living took priority and it wasn't until 2005 that The Predators, another thriller was published.

I found the time to chair the national drug rehabilitation charity Phoenix House for seven years and to chair the community service charity Charterhouse-in-Southwark. I held posts in the International Bar Association and was a member of the government's Monopolies/ Competition Commission. But writing was what I really wanted to do. My travels in the east gave me the material for Teaching yourself Tranquillity, 2007, a non-spiritual approach to meditation.

In 2008 I was back with fiction. Caring for Cathy is a black comedy about the tears and laughs in my experience of caring for a person with a degenerative disease. Blue Lantern, 2009, which arises from my adventures in Hong Kong is about police corruption, and Present Tense, 2010, deals with a woman confronted by her rapist of many years before.

In 2011 I wrote The Happy Humanist. My daughter (a psychologist) saw an untitled early draft and asked me why I wrote it. I said "It's what I believe." She replied, "Dad, people don't want stewed prunes. They want apple pie." She was right. So The Happy Humanist was refocused around what it takes to be at one with ourselves, and I think it is all the better for that.

In 2013 I returned to fiction with, The Cruel Peak, where I deal with the effect on a family who have attained celebrity by falsehood, when the falsehood is revealed.

Codename Wolf was my next. The secret services take themselves very seriously and are usually depicted in films and books in a very straight manner. I wanted to take a look at the nonsense behind the facade of espionage.

Don't Cry for the Brave, 2014, is set in Vietnam. I explore the behaviour of front line soldiers under stress who kill civilians.

Unforgiving Shore, 2015 is a family saga about a woman who conceals her son's paternity and why.

Rendezvous with Death, 2016 is about a man who takes revenge for a wrongful accusation.

In Night Shelter, 2017 a girl is murdered at a party. The most likely killer is 'too big to touch', feared by the police and the suspects. But somebody has to take the rap.

Bill Batley's Notebook (2019) is the reflection of a previously 'important' business executive who has been generously pensioned off. Who is he now and what should he do in a mad world?