Stephen Leather The author

After graduating, I was offered a place on the Daily Mirror Graduate Training Scheme, where I was trained as a journalist. They taught me how to ask questions, how to gather facts, and how to construct a story. In short, they taught me how to write. And once I was in the habit of writing a couple of thousand words a day, I had the confidence to start writing fiction again.

I wrote my first book, Pay Off, while I was working as a journalist in the City office of the Daily Mirror newspaper. Harper Collins bought it, and my next thriller, The Fireman, which I wrote while I was working as Business Editor of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.

Hungry Ghost was my second book to be set in Hong Kong, and then I returned to London to work for The Times as a night news editor. It was at the time of a major IRA bombing campaign and I wrote The Chinaman, the story of a man whose family is killed in a terrorist bombing. I'd left Harper Collins by then and The Chinaman went to auction and was bought by Hodder and Stoughton, who have been my publishers since 1992. It was my first real bestseller and is still selling well. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

I started writing full time after I sold The Chinaman, and returned to Hong Kong to write The Vets. It was my biggest book by far - in terms of words written. The first draft was more than 300,000 words and I ended up throwing away 50,000 words. Generally I try to write books between 120,000 and 160,000 words.

Then I started spending more time in the United States, mainly in Baltimore, and I set my next two books, The Long Shot and The Birthday Girl, there.

After publication of The Birthday Girl I moved to Dublin where I wrote The Double Tap, then I returned to the Far East to write The Solitary Man (Hong Kong and Thailand) and The Tunnel Rats (Thailand and Vietnam).

My publishers were keen for me to start setting my novels back in the UK (I'd had a run of stories set in South East Asia) so I wrote The Bombmaker, which was published in 1999, a kidnapping story set in Dublin and London. It was filmed for Sky One with the marvelous Dervla Kirwan playing the part of Andrea Hayes, an IRA bombmaker who is forced out of retirement by the kidnapping of her young daughter. Mark Womack played the part of Martin Hayes, her husband.

I wrote another TV drama for Sky called The Stretch. It's a two-part London gangster story and featured Eastenders stars Leslie Grantham and Anita Dobson. Hodder and Stoughton were keen to have The Stretch as a book and it was published in 2000. It was the easiest book to write by far as I already the dialogue in the scripts and I'd had the opportunity of seeing Anita and Leslie playing the roles. The book took less than three months to write, much less than the year it usually takes me.

My next book was Tango One, published in February 2002. It's about an undercover police operation to bring down a multi-national drugs dealer, Den Donovan. Donovan has more than the undercover cops to worry about - his wife and accountant have stolen $60 million from him, a Colombian gang is after his blood and he has to bring up his young son alone. All this while he's Tango One - number one on HM Customs and Excise List of most wanted criminals.

The Eyewitness was published in February 2003 and is a dark, gritty, story about a forensic detective working in Sarajevo who tries to track down the only witness to a mass murder in the killing fields of the former Yugoslavia. The hero, Jack Solomon, comes up against corrupt cops, the Albanian mafia and Maltese gangsters as he tries to bring the killers to justice.

The book published in 2004 was Hard Landing, the story of an undercover policeman who is sent into a maximum-security prison in the UK to bring down a drugs baron who is running his organisation from behind bars. As part of the research for Hard Landing I spent a day inside Belmarsh Prison in South London, where best-selling author Jeffrey Archer was a recent guest. I was chuffed to discover that my books were a big hit in the prison library. The hero is SAS-trooper turned undercover cop Dan ‘Spider’ Shepherd. I intend to make Spider Shepherd the hero of my next few books. One of my big regrets was killing off Mike ‘Joker’ Cramer who appeared in The Chinaman, The Long Shot and The Double Tap. I won’t make the same mistake with Spider!

In Soft Target, published in 2005, I have Shepherd investigating a rogue armed police unit, a woman who wants her gangster husband murdered, and terrorists planning a major bombing campaign on the Tube. The events I wrote about became horribly true on July 7 when four ‘British’ Muslim suicide bombers killed more than fifty people in London. In the book, Shepherd shoots a suspected terrorist in the back of the head seven times, another event that was dramatically mirrored by a real-life incident. A lot of so-called terrorism experts are now claiming to be wise after the event, but Soft Target was on the shelves five months before the bombs went off.

The third book to feature Shepherd was Cold Kill, published in February 2006. In Cold Kill he is up against terrorists who want to blow up the Eurostar as it passes underneath the English Channel. I just hope that I am not overtaken by events. Part of the new book is set in Sydney, Australia, another city which I fear will be hit by terrorists sooner rather than later. We’ll see. Cold Kill was nominated for the Best Novel category in the 2007 Thrillerfest in New York and for Best Thriller in the 11th Annual Barry Awards at Bouchercon in Anchorage, Alaska.

The fourth Spider Shepherd book was Hot Blood, published in February 2007, in which Shepherd has to decide how far he can go to save the life of a former SAS colleague. Geordie Mitchell is kidnapped by terrorists in Iraq, thrown into a basement and the world is told that he’ll be beheaded within fourteen days. The British Government is powerless to help so it’s up to Shepherd and his friends to do what they can to get Mitchell out. But the only way of rescuing Mitchell is to be as merciless as the terrorists themselves.

The fifth book in the Spider Shepherd series was Dead Men, published in January 2008, in which Spider Shepherd goes undercover in Belfast. IRA killers freed under the Good Friday Agreement are being murdered one by one and Shepherd’s mission is to get close to the main suspect – the widow of an RUC officer murdered more than ten years earlier. Dead Men gave me the chance to explore the way the IRA has changed, but also to compare it with present-day al-Qaeda.

The book for 2009 will be Live Fire in which Spider has to infiltrate a team of bank robbers. The mission puts him on a collision course with a group of Islamic fundamentalists who are planning to shoot down an airliner at Heathrow Airport.

Most of the books I write are big international thrillers, but I like to stretch myself by writing in other genres. The problem is that they are not the type of books that my publisher, Hodder and Stoughton, wants to publish. I’ve put them on this website as free downloads on my Unpublished Work page. The unpublished books are: Once Bitten (a British psychologist tracks down vampires in Los Angeles); The Basement (a serial killer story with a great twist) and Dreamer’s Cat (a virtual reality murder mystery). I think they are among the best things I’ve written. Read them and judge for yourself.

Private Dancer, the story of a doomed relationship between a travel writer and a Thai bargirl, was an unpublished on-line work for many years but it is now available in bookstores throughout Thailand, or you can buy it on line by following the link below.

I have also collaborated with Warren Olson, a Kiwi who was a private detective in Bangkok for ten years. Together we have produced Confessions Of A Bangkok Private Eye, based on more than two dozen of his cases. It’s different from my regular thrillers but it’s fun and gives you an idea of what a crazy place Thailand can be. The book is published by Monsoon Books in Singapore by my good friend Phil Tatham who also publishes Private Dancer outside Thailand.

So far as the future is concerned, I’m working on a new Spider Shepherd novel, and I am planning a series of books set in Thailand about a former New Orleans cop turned antiques dealer who solves mysteries in his spare time. Watch out for Bangkok Bob!