The great advantage of writing both short stories and novels is that one can be unfaithful to one's loyal characters and return to them when the fancy takes you (or publishers or editors request their presence, of course).

With the occasional lapse, I live chiefly with five characters, all very different. Marsh & Daughter live in the present time, and only about ten miles away from me; they have chosen not to have their photos included for reasons of personal safety (being mobbed by ardent fans?). The other three are only too happy for their likenesses to appear.

In Murder, 'Orrible Murder, a collection of my short stories published by Crippen & Landru, this trio appear between the same covers, together with other 'sleuths' to keep an eye on them, including William Shakespeare and Sherlock Holmes.

Check the Books page for more details on my live-in partners' cases

Marsh & Daughter: Peter and Georgia Marsh investigate crimes from the past, which frequently bring them under threat in the present, if long festering passions are aroused. Peter is an ebullient wheelchair-bound ex-cop, and his daughter Georgia, having escaped from a disastrous marriage to a conman, now lives with their publisher Luke Frost. The sparky relationship between father and daughter is a spur to their resurrecting forgotten or unsolved crimes where injustice has occurred.

Their interest in taking on a case stems from their sensing unfinished business in the atmosphere of a place or building, their privately named 'fingerprints on time' theory. Their third case, Murder in Hell's Corner (August 2006) harks back to the Battle of Britain in 1940, when a Spitfire pilot, Patrick Fairfax, is found murdered years later in 1975. From there they bounced back (April 2007) still further when Peter's private obsession with whether or not King Arthur was a historical figure leads them into a case where his golden cup is the trophy.

In 2008 Murder in a Mist takes them back to the Fernbourne Five, a group of artists and writers who flourished in a small Kentish village in the 1930s and 1940s. The love triangle between three of them ended in the suicide of the poet Alwyn Field - but what is the truth behind that death?

Auguste Didier is a master chef, working in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods; he has made full length appearances in eleven novels as well as many bows in short stories. He has a high opinion of his own powers as a chef, so much so that he is a reluctant detective - and shares the role with Inspector Egbert Rose of Scotland Yard. Beginning with Murder in Pug's Parlour his most recent novel was Murder in the Queen's Boudoir, but his annoyance at not being currently in the limelight was alleviated by his reappearance of some of his best cases in Murder, 'Orrible Murder.

Tom Wasp is a chimney sweep in Victorian London's East End, and together with Ned, his former climbing boy apprentice, clears up many a murky crime. Tom has a heart of gold and he and Ned form a strong team. His first full length novel to appear in the US is published by Five Star Publishing, Tom Wasp and the Murdered Stunner, in which a beautiful artist's model called Bessie, is found murdered and Tom's patron, a PreRaphaelite painter, is accused of killing her. His short stories, published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and the Crime Writers'Association annual anthology, are reprinted in Murder 'Orrible Murder.A new short story, 'Tom Wasp and the Swell Mob', is appearing in The Mammoth Book of Dickensian Whodunnits, edited by Mike Ashley (Robinson, UK, and Carroll & Graf, USA) later in 2007.

Aphrodite: the frivolous Greek goddess of love, who appears in short stories only (being too busy with her love affairs to concentrate on a full novel) is an enthusiastic detective when her own interests are threatened - particularly her amorous ones. So far she has investigated nefarious doings in Troy; who killed her lover Adonis; the death of Dido; and the tragic deaths of Babylonian lovers Pyramus and Thisbe. She is currently working hard on solving the question of who killed Orpheus. Aphrodite has eagerly assented to her stories being reprinted in Murder, 'Orrible Murder.