His novel Whose Little Girl are You, written under the "David Craig" pseudonym, was filmed as The Squeeze, starring Stacy Keach, Edward Fox and David Hemmings. The fourth Harpur & Iles novel, Protection, was televised by the BBC in 1996 as Harpur & Iles, starring Aneirin Hughes as Harpur and Hywel Bennett as Iles. France does me proud. The Harpur and Iles novel Protection has just won the Prix du Polar Européen 2004 (prize for the best crime novel of 2004). Actually, it means the best published in French. France are working through all the Harpur and Iles books and are only up to Protection, which came out here and in the US in 1988. Seventeen to go.

Iles has internal affairs sniffing about. As well as an up and coming detective having an affair with his wife. Dominating all, however, is the relationship between DCS Colin Harpur and ACC Desmond Iles. Harpur and Iles are trapped in a hellish relationship of need and hatred. Each needs the other's skills to work effectively against the crooks. But Iles hates Harpur for having had an affair with his wife; Harpur is trying to keep Iles away from his underage daughter. And Harpur tries to shore up his Chief Constable, who is recovering from a breakdown, against Iles's constant undermining and baiting.

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I'm gratified. I remember the afternoon when I was sitting in a secondhand bookshop, and the laconic owner handed me a copy of Roses, Roses (tenth in the series) and said, "Here. You might like this." (Or was he phlegmatic? Perhaps he was laconic on his mother's side, phlegmatic on his father's.) As for no department's being willing to tolerate an Iles for long, James made this interesting declaration in an interview I did with himL The books are not exactly forgotten; the series is now up to twenty-three novels with a twenty-fourth due this year. But James' brand of dark betrayal, darker humor and keen social comedy has remained a connoisseur's taste, beloved of critics for the rich beauty of its prose style, among other features, but never selling in the mass numbers that its excellence deserves.

I write about organised crime, not single murders. I didn't think organised crime would be credible in Wales. We don't have cities like Glasgow, Manchester, London where large scale criminal operations happen. This is good from the point of view of living here; not so good from the crime fiction point of view. But I thought that once the Bay got going, with the huge sums of money involved, then organised crime became a possibility. So, I started the Brade and Jenkins books. Whereas Harpur and Iles are in a nowhere city, Brade and Jenkins are very Cardiff. I have another Cardiff book coming out in January, 2005, with a girl detective leading. It's called Hear Me Talking To You, and appears under my David Craig pen name. Brade and Jenkins get a mention in this one, but that's about all. So, if Wales has been neglected for crime, i'm working on it at the Cardiff end. Most fiction has sex. It's sometimes disguised as romance or love interest. Where would Madame Bovary be without it, or The End of the Affair, or Romeo and Juliet or Anna Karenina or Mills and Boon or Lady Chatterley or Anthony Powell? I jumped on the Bill James bandwagon five or six years ago, when I first started reading crime fiction. I mean, I remember where I was and what I was doing the first time someone handed me one of his novels. It is a mystery to me, too, why he is not better known. Is he too literary for crime-fiction circles and too crime-fiction for literary circles?A well-dressed corpse found shot in the sand and gravel wharf sparks trouble for Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and his unpredictable boss, Assistant Chief Constable Iles. Assistant Chief Constable Desmond Iles (Hywel Bennett) is an abrasive, cynical copper who has eyes on the top job.