Author Simon Brett – around 115 books so far and counting

Presented by Chichester’s twinning associations and followed by refreshments from France, Italy and Malta, Simon’s talk will be in The Assembly Room, The Council House, North Street, Chichester on Monday, June 26 at 7.30pm.

Simon can name the first few of his books in order, but certainly not the lot; but he has certainly been prolific, though not on the scale of English crime writer John Creasey, he is quick to point out. Creasey, who also wrote science fiction, romance and western novels, ended up totting up more than 600 novels using 28 different pseudonyms.

“He was the founder of the Crime Writers Association and they were doing some kind of conference. He offered to sit in a glass barrel from Thursday to Sunday and while the conference was going on he would write a novel. At first they thought it was a good idea but then they decided that was dishonouring the Crime Writers Association a little bit so they didn't do it!”

Simon wrote his first book nearly 50 years ago: “The preponderance of them have been crime. It's mostly crime and humour and a few anthologies. I have done 21 in the Fethering series and 21 in the Charles Paris series and nine in the Mrs Pargeter series. I was a radio producer and I tried writing novels. I wrote three or four before I had one accepted but then I was delegated to produce the Lord Peter Wimsey series as a radio producer in 73 or 74. Ian Carmichael had played the role on TV and they wanted him to do the part on radio.”

And really that was Simon's way into crime: “I had always been rather frightened of crime fiction. I thought you had to have a computer brain to work out the plot but when we were taking apart the Wimsey, I realised that plot is really important but character and dialogue were actually just as important. I thought that I could manage character and dialogue and so I wrote the first Charles Paris book. I was working with a lot of middle-aged actors and I had become intrigued by middle-aged actors so I decided to have an actor detective. If you don't know about police procedure and or if you aren't interested in police procedure, then just invent an amateur detective!

“The fascination with crime as a writer is that it enables you to research backgrounds that are interesting to you and also there is a structure which you can find quite comforting. It's like a clothes horse. The clothes horse is very dull piece of furniture. What really matters is what you cover it with. You think of Dick Francis books writing about jockeys investigating murders and it's complete nonsense of course but you do get the continuity there. And the great thing is that you can follow your character into all kinds of different media. You come up against all different sorts of things and you think ‘How would my character react to this?’ Of course it's technically satisfying to work out the plot. But what I really find much more interesting and exciting to explore is how the characters react to different things. You start with a crime and you end up with a solution or maybe a resolution but how you get between the two points is totally down to you.”