That’s why they have a rubric at the front of every book, which is a tribute to the rubric that appears at the beginning of every ‘87 th Precinct’ novel. It was modelled on, though not slavishly so, Ed McBain’s ‘87 th Precinct’ series. That’s hardly surprising, because they have very adult themes. Having said this ‘The Beat’ always had more of an adult audience than most of my one-off books. This type of fiction tends to be called new adult fiction these days, and that’s as good a phrase is any to describe it.

Some of the point of view characters were older adults, which you don’t tend to get in young adult fiction. The series lasted two years of chronological time (the probationary period of the police officers involved). I wrote the series over six years and as it progressed, the police officers got older.

So it wouldn’t have been realistic to write the characters in the same way that I wrote the earlier books, where the characters tend to be between the age of 15 and 17, which is the more common age for the protagonists in young adult fiction. Part of that was because the protagonists had to be older (you couldn’t join the police until you were 19). It was my series going out under my own name, so I could write a little bit older than I previously had done. When I started doing ‘The Beat’, I got the freedom to write something more personal.

My first three young adult books were very much aimed at the younger end of the young adult market, 12 to 14 years of age. They may have a different feel because ‘The Beat’ novels, unlike ‘Bone and Cane’ were written for teenagers, and you do need to get straight to the point when you’re writing for that audience. ‘The Beat’ novels, a series written twenty years ago, are about young police officers going through their probation period, whereas your more recent ‘Bone and Cane’ series features a politician and convicted criminal and has a very different feel in term of writing style. I wondered what influence they had on his current ‘Bone and Cane’ series and what it was like for an author to write a contemporary crime novel in the 1990s (The Beat) and write a crime novel now, but set in the 1990s (Bone and Cane). David Belbin has recently made some of his ‘The Beat’ series, written in the 1990s, available as e-books. These earlier works may provide an interesting comparison to an author’s current novels, as well as introducing new readers to their work. The revolution in e-books means that authors are able to make previously out-of-print books easily available, at an affordable price.

Smokescreen by David Belbin