Sometimes this was present in the detail-in Cherokee Outlet, for instance, Wes Hart recalls his first meeting with Billy the Kid, at which the Kid shot the heads off several chickens, which is a direct reference to the opening of the Peckinpah movie-but more often in the tone and the predicament of the protagonists, who time and again find themselves shut out of a society they know and recognize but that increasingly fails to recognize and accept them.

Inside and yet outside.

Belonging and yet not belonging.

When I began thinking of a central character for the book that was to become the first of the Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts, there were only two things fairly clear in my mind: he would be a policeman rather than a private detective, and-somehow-he would belong to the community he was policing and yet be outside it. What I needed, and finally found in the groups of shiny-suited men of an indeterminate age who spent their days hanging around the entrance to Nottingham ’s Victoria Centre market, was a way of signifying this “difference.” (Yes, sorry, I’d been dabbling in structuralist theory while working for my master’s degree in American Studies and it had rubbed off.)

The men were Polish, part of a large community that had settled in the area around the time of the Second World War; in Nottingham there were two flourishing Polish clubs and a large and well-attended Polish Catholic church. If, I thought, that was the close-knit community to which my character’s family belonged, then it was not too fanciful to imagine him being brought up in a home where Polish was still spoken, but going to local schools where English with a pronounced Notts accent was the common currency, and with one set of customs and expectations vying with the other.

And his name? What about his name?

A friend in New York of Polish origin had the name Resnick; foreign and yet not too difficult for the average insular Brit to pronounce and understand. And then, suddenly, “Charlie” leaped out at me and seemed perfect. Quintessentially English, friendly, unthreatening, approachable, almost-as far as it is possible in England – untainted by class.

Charlie Resnick.

Insider and outsider both.

I remember several long sessions talking about him with the late Dulan Barber, who wrote crime fiction as David Fletcher and supernatural thrillers as Owen Brookes, and was both a generous and an unyielding mentor.

Pretty much following the stereotype, I’d decided early on that Resnick would be living alone and that in his past there would be a failed marriage that would be the source, from time to time, of a certain amount of anguish and regret. Anger too.

“What else,” Dulan asked, “do we know about this man?”

His age, his weight, his taste in music, food, clothes?

In a glib moment, I once described Resnick as being akin to Jim Rockford but dressed like Columbo. As shorthand perhaps it works, though the visual equivalent I had most clearly in mind was Sergeant Valnikov, the police detective in Harold Becker’s fine film of Joseph Wambaugh’s The Black Marble. As played by Robert Foxworth, Valnikov is a fairly hopeless alcoholic of Russian origin, prone to nostalgia and self-pity and more often than not dressed in a shabby raincoat, tie askew, hair akimbo. Skip the alcohol, switch Russian to Polish, and the picture that remains is close to the one that was forming at the back of my mind.

I don’t know if it was Dulan or myself who first came up with the idea of the sandwiches. But, we thought, a man living on his own and who leads a busy professional life would not have a great deal of time to set aside for serious cooking-though there are instances when he performs near-miracles with a few eggs and whatever leftovers the fridge provides. Sandwiches, though, seemed perfect, especially if the ingredients were mostly bought at one or another of the Polish delicatessen stalls to be found in the market, and at which he could conveniently stop on his way back from the coffee stall where he enjoyed his morning espresso.

It was my decision to make him a lover of jazz. (Dulan’s tastes leaned toward high opera and the songs of Richard Strauss, with a strange but understandable penchant for Dusty Springfield.) A long-term listener to jazz myself-and, for a short period, a less than moderate practitioner-I wanted the opportunity to write about the music I knew, to try and give the reader, as far as it can be achieved in words, a sense of what Resnick is hearing when he listens, be it to Billie Holiday or Charlie Parker or whoever, and to describe as accurately as possible the actual sounds. More than that, I hoped I could make Resnick’s sympathy and enthusiasm for the music say something about the man himself; it might suggest-as, in another way, I suppose, do his culinary appetites-an imaginative richness not otherwise apparent. I also wanted, if I could, to draw a connection between Resnick’s appreciation of that listening experience and his understanding of people and their emotions, the things they feel and do.

Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times some years ago, the critic Lloyd Sachs was kind enough to state, “One of the things Resnick draws from the music is the ability to sense deeper possibilities in people, criminals as well as victims of crime. Just as he is aware of Lester Young’s hard life producing this beautiful music, he sees people leading difficult lives being able to produce something of worth too. Maybe even something beautiful.”

I fear I was less successful with the cats. I had, it’s true, owned cats at different times in my life, but I also harbored, since childhood, a recurring fear of them-see the opening of the first Frank Elder novel, Flesh & Blood (2004). But it was Dulan who was the real cat lover, and it was probably at his instigation that Resnick’s caring nature is revealed through his treatment of no less than four cats, named after jazz musicians, who function as substitutes for the children his marriage failed to provide. In retrospect, I think they are in danger of being cute and little more and too frequently get under the writer’s feet in their need for attention. From correspondence, however, I know there are readers-mostly female and mostly, it appears, living in the United States -who will vehemently disagree.

All of the above, however, means that Resnick’s basic characteristics were pretty much in place before I sat down to write Lonely Hearts, as I think is clear from the beginning of chapter four.

The sandwich was tuna fish and egg mayonnaise with some small slices of pickled gherkin and a crumbling of blue cheese; the mayonnaise kept dripping over the edges of the bread and down onto his fingers so that Dizzy twisted and stretched from his lap in order to lick it off. Billie Holiday and Lester Young were doing it through the headphones, making love to music without ever holding hands. Resnick could not stop thinking about the fact that he had lied to Skelton, wondering why.

His marriage had neither been so bad that he had stricken it from the record of his memory, nor so lacking in incident that he would have truly forgotten. Something over five years and she had walked in while he was painting the woodwork in the spare room and announced that she wanted a divorce. Each year of their marriage he had redecorated that small room at the back of their own bedroom in the hope that one day she might walk in with a glow in her eyes and announce that she was pregnant. Why else did he use alphabet wallpaper in primary colours? Why else the paintwork in bright reds and greens?

Or, as one of the characters observes of him earlier on,

He was an overweight man in his early forties, whose narrow eyes were bagged and tired, and who couldn’t find the time to drop his tie off at the cleaners.