A BESTSELLING crime writer has revealed how two Croydon police officers helped shape the latest instalment of his long-running detective series.
In Mark Billingham's new Tom Thorne novel The Dying Hours, the detective inspector is transplanted from north to south London, and demoted from plain clothes into uniform.
Mr Billingham, 51, said he decided to "mess with" his leading character's circumstances after two female Croydon officers invited him on their beat.
He added: "They sent me an e-mail and said 'We like the book; if you ever fancy coming out with us we will show you what life is like'.
"The first one was a couple of years ago [2011]. It was a bank holiday weekend.
"Within half an hour of the shift starting we had a dead woman in her flat. The officer said to me, 'Are you OK with the body?' and I was trying to be all macho over it and 'yes, yes, fine,' but it was the first time I had ever seen a body.
"The shift ended ten hours later with a lady lying in the street – it was an horrendous traffic accident."
There was nothing suspicious about the first body, he explained, but it was of course the officers' job to check .
Mr Billingham has been on a couple more outings with the officers and said it was not so much what he saw on the streets as what he observed among the team that informed his work.
He said: "I have hung out with a lot of plainclothes detectives but this was the first time I got close to uniform, so I realised the tension that exists between uniform and non-uniform, and it was interesting to write about that.
"It's a really traditional thing – plainclothes detectives, some tend to think they are superior to officers in uniform and the officers think, 'we are the ones that have to do all the tough work and they are the ones that get all get the credit'.
"What you get after spending a bit of time with each other is how they speak to each other; the banter.
"There is a lot of humour."
In return, the officers – of whom he speaks highly and whose names he declined to reveal – have been immortalised as characters in his book.
Also keeping their fictional identities under wraps, he added: "Readers will have to work that out when they read the book."
The Dying Hours, published on May 23, is the 12th instalment in the Tom Thorne series, which Mr Billingham started in 2001.
The novels were turned into a Sky1 television series starting in October 2010, starring David Morrissey in the title role.
