All the crime novels advertised and sold through this website feature a central character, Bob Henderson,
a retired professor of philosophy, who returns to the north-east to live in Stanhope (County Durham), having been away for most of his adult life.

So far, I have written three of these Bob Henderson Mysteries – but I have ideas for several more.

The novels are not consciously auto-biographical. But they certainly gave me a way of writing about a region I knew intimately, for I was born on the Durham coalfield in 1947 and grew up in the mining village of Fencehouses. Also, like Bob Henderson, I am an academic, having worked in universities for over thirty years, the last few of them as Professor of Politics in the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Therefore, and unlike Bob, I am not a professional philosopher, although I do have a strong interest in philosophical ideas.

My father worked as an overman in Lambton colliery and was a fanatical supporter of Sunderland Football Club, a pastime to which he introduced me aged eight. This means that I have been suffering from red-and-white eyeballs for fifty-two years. It also means, I suppose, that I am a ‘Mackem’ – although that word was unknown during all the years I was standing in the Roker End of Roker Park.

Like many lucky post-war children I was the first in my family to attend university, and I left the north-east in 1968 to study first in Sheffield then in Oxford. I have never lived in Durham or Northumberland for any length of time since, although I visit fairly regularly. Also, like a lot of people of my generation, I became part of a sort of ‘international diaspora’, living and working in such diverse places as Kenya and Tanzania, Swansea in Wales, London, Brazil, the east coast of the United States, Russia and (since 1991) in Sydney, Australia. So perhaps the novels are my way of dealing with the nostalgia that often accompanies a globe-trotting life. But they are not only that. For crime fiction is a rich and rewarding genre which has allowed me to explore ideas – political, social, historical, geographical – in what I think are new and interesting ways.

In all my fiction I try to combine a lot of humour with good strong plots and a few serious philosophical and political reflections. I also believe that detective fiction in particular should have complex believable characters and stories that makes sense psychologically and sociologically – that are not simply ‘who dunnit’ logical puzzles.

I hope that you will take up the offer to read the free first chapters of my novels and that, once you have, you will become interested enough in Bob as an inadvertent detective (and in his real detective friend Superintendent Peter Halgrave) to go on and buy the books. I certainly think that, if you do, you will enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

It goes without saying, for the internet is nothing if not a communication tool, that I will be most appreciative of any comments you might like to send me and will do my best to respond.

Best wishes,
Gavin Kitching