This last observation was made by the social worker Rachel Chaplin, with whom Resnick becomes involved professionally and personally. It was my intention, I think, that there would be some kind of romantic interest for Resnick in most of the books, each more or less doomed to end badly. Meantime, a relationship of a different kind was slowly building up between Resnick and the junior member of his team, Lynn Kellogg. Cold Light (1994), the sixth in the series, ends (as, in my head, it began) with Resnick thinking of her as “the daughter he had never had, the lover she would never be.”

Shows how little I knew.

Hand in hand with my decision that my hero would be a serving policeman was the assumption that, as such, he would be one-the central one-of a group of fellow officers, a team. In this I was influenced both by police procedurals I had read-Ed McBain, Joseph Wambaugh, et al.-and those I had seen on TV, early British series like Z Cars and later American ones like Hill Street Blues. In respect to the latter, Resnick would be the middle-management figure holding it all together-Frank Furillo but with a different tailor.

One great advantage, it seemed, of this kind of structure was that it would enable me to employ a multistrand narrative and shift the focus of the story away from Resnick to other members of the team. In so doing, not only could I introduce characters of differing age and gender and sexual orientation, I could also vary the pace and cover more narrative ground. For every chapter showing Resnick listening thoughtfully to, say, Thelonious Monk at home, I could have another in which one of his young DCs chases an armed villain across the rooftops.

The move from writing Westerns to crime fiction was not an instant one; in between I wrote quite a bit of television drama-from BBC Classic serials such as the dramatization of Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns to episodes of popular crime series like Spender. Indeed, the last project I worked on before turning to Lonely Hearts was a six-part series I had originated about the probation service, called Hard Cases. This was written about and largely filmed on location in Nottingham, where I was then living, and followed, as far as we were able, the Hill Street Blues pattern to a T. (I sat down with a stopwatch and timed the sequences of that program exactly before planning my first scene-by-scene outline.)

Scriptwriting not only sharpened my use of dialogue and ability to cut between incidents and characters, it made clear both the importance of place and the possibility-I’m tempted to say necessity-of presenting people and their actions within a social context.

I’ve already mentioned Z Cars, a groundbreaking police series that locked into the strong documentary tradition of British cinema with its use of believable working-class characters, regional accents, and location filming. No wonder this was where such filmmakers and writers as Ken Loach, Alan Plater, and Troy Kennedy Martin did a lot of their early work.

I have always remembered an especially harrowing episode of Softly, Softly, the series that grew out of Z Cars, in which the police are investigating serious instances of child abuse instigated within the family. In one of the final scenes, after the abusers have been arrested and taken away, a detective is talking to one of the abused children, making sure the child is all right, and in gratitude the child offers to perform a sexual act-it is the only way that child knows to show thanks and gain approval.

The look on the detective’s face-expressing in a moment revulsion, understanding, compassion, and deep, deep sorrow-has lived with me and, I’m sure, informed some of Resnick’s responses in those parts of Lonely Hearts that deal with a similar theme. Beyond that, it convinced me that the crime story, whether in fiction or on film, at its best can-and should-deal with the same themes and situations that provide the subject matter for more supposedly serious work.

The importance of Nottingham to the Resnick books should not be underestimated. In the simplest of terms, I chose it as the setting for the novels as, certain areas of London aside, it was the city I knew best. I had lived there for quite long stretches of time, initially as a teacher, then as a student, and latterly as a writer. Situated in the less-than-fashionable East Midlands and some 120 miles north of London, it is only medium size as British cities go (the current population is just in excess of a quarter of a million) and so representative in its mix of income, class, and race that it is often chosen by market researchers as one of the key places to try out their wares. That very mix, with low-rent and high-income residences often cheek by jowl, makes it also a good test ground for a writer. All human life, as a popular British newspaper used to boast of its pages, is here.

When I first moved to Nottingham in the mid-’60s, the area was still a center for industry-coal mining, textiles and hosiery, Raleigh bicycles, Players cigarettes. Now most of that industry has either disappeared or downsized to unrecognizable proportions, and it is unclear what, if anything, has taken its place. Nevertheless, in the midst of some severe poverty, poor living conditions, and a struggling education system, pockets of wealth and creativity survive and prosper.

Writers have generally portrayed the city as a rumbustious, lively place with a good kicking about as close as the nearest pint of Shippo’s, and the area as a whole has nurtured a reputation for roughness and violence. Think of Alan Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, or, further back, the early short stories of D. H. Lawrence, set in the small mining communities to the west of the city (where I began my teaching), in which it was normal for the wives and children to hide under the kitchen tables when the colliers were on their way home from the pub after getting paid.

More recently, Nottingham has acquired an unwanted and to some degree unwarranted reputation as the murder capital of Britain, thanks to a number of high-profile murders occurring within a short period, overstretching the resources of the local constabulary, and too many well-publicized instances of gun crime fueled both by the drug trade and by rivalries between young residents of various inner-city housing estates.

Rightly or wrongly, I felt that in writing about Nottingham, I was giving the Resnick novels a setting that I could portray with a degree of knowledge and conviction and that Resnick himself could be seen to know and understand. And love. Warts, as they say, and all.

There’s one last question about Resnick I have to address, one I’m often asked: how much, if any, of him is me?

If we acknowledge the fact that, like each of my characters, he comes from some mixture, peculiar to me, of observation and imagination, then the answer is very little. In simple terms, I don’t live off sandwiches or have four cats; I am not childless and rarely spill food down my tie. Not that, Detection Club dinners aside, I ever even wear a tie.

But his Nottingham is, or has been, mine. For years I walked across the city center, midmorning, to take my place at the same coffee stall.

My first real experience of listening to Billie Holiday came when shuffling through a pile of old vinyl 78s belonging to a school friend’s uncle-“I Cried for You” by Teddy Wilson and his Orchestra, with Billie Holiday, vocal refrain. There among the Earl Bostic and early Duke Ellington and Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. For Resnick, in Cutting Edge (1991), this became an occasion when, as a boy, he visited the house of an uncle who worked as a tailor-with thumbs like sheet metal and fingers like silk-who had visited America and returned with a bundle of recordings that the young Resnick pored over and listened to with wonder.