I was born in 1939 in Barking, which was then in Essex and is now in East London. This makes me either an Essex Boy or an Eastender, and an impostor in either category. Barking Public Library provided at least as much of my early education as did Westbury Primary School. 

My first serious ambition was to be a musician; and I was for a time a Junior Exhibitioner at the Royal Academy of Music. But instead I found myself at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and obtained a degree in German and Russian. Then I held various posts in university libraries – Leeds, Malta, Edinburgh where I obtained a PhD in German, and Liverpool (as Chief Librarian). I derived inside knowledge of the ways of academe at that time. I visited Indonesia as adviser to the National Library in Jakarta. 

So much for Dr Jekyll. As Mr Hyde I played the trombone in amateur orchestras, and accompanied and conducted amateur operatic societies. Or are Jekyll and Hyde the other way round? 

My aims as a novelist are: to create characters who will make the reader care (though not always benevolently) about what happens to them; to describe events which will make the reader want to know what happens next; and to write sentences that do not oblige the reader to puzzle out the meaning. 

I was married for 48 years to Susan, whom I met in the University Library in Leeds. She encouraged me in the early drafts of ‘Murder by Degrees’. I am a widower with 3 daughters and 7 grandchildren.