For those who do not come from there, it is important to know something about the north-east of England if you are really to understand the Bob Henderson novels, so here is a short introduction.

From the early nineteenth century to the 1980s, the northen English counties of Durham and Northumberland shared a common 'heavy industrial' history of coal mining, iron and steel production, shipbuilding and heavy engineering.

As a result, for 150 or more years the region they constituted was dominated by a strongly male working class culture in which trade unions, football, beer and Labour politics all played important roles and helped to create a very powerful regional identity. It was, and to a degree still is, a regional identity which is so strong because it is simultaneously a class identity.

This strong regional identity is also expressed in a unique and well known 'Geordie' dialect of English, a dialect which is in fact not   a single entity, but a kind of dialect range shading into Yorkshire speech in the south and into lowland Scots in the north. Its most outstanding feature, and the feature which makes it instantly recognisable as 'Geordie' even to outsiders, is the predominance of Scandinavian-like (in fact Danish/Viking) vowel sounds.

However, since the 1960s the heavy industry of the region has declined, and with it the dominance of the working class culture to which it gave rise. One after another, coal mining, ship building, iron and steel and heavy engineering have all shrunk or disappeared, and the region has lost population. Parts of it are still disfigured by the 'rust belt' urban and social decay which is a feature of many similar regions around the western world.

For all these reasons the north-east to which Bob Henderson returns in the novels is a region very different from the one he had left in the 1960s. He is reminded of this powerfully when he visits the depressed shell of the Durham mining village in which he was brought up, or goes to the shrunken fishing port of North Shields to take a trip on an old trawler.

But 'under' the industrial north-east created in Victorian times, there was a still older region, agricultural, hierarchical, almost feudal in some ways. Bob lives in a place - Stanhope in the upper Wear valley - which represents that still older north-east.

It is emerging from beneath its industrial history as a lead mining centre to reveal its astonishing natural beauty, and in this it typifies much of the region today.