What drew you specifically to Barcelona as a setting? How does the city shape the stories you tell?

The first novel in the series, Catfish Alley, was the classic lockdown novel. I was watching too much Netflix, and I came across a Catalan-made series set in Barcelona. I disliked almost everything about it, but I loved the authenticity of the Barcelona as presented by people who actually lived there, so much more interesting than the tourist trap we’re usually shown.

I had an idea for a couple of characters, and I thought I’d stick them into a crime story. How hard could that be, I thought. I found out the hard way.

I was previously a fantasy writer, and I’d expected the process of imagining and depicting an real city to be very different to a fantasy one. But in practice they turned out to be almost the same process: getting your idea of a location out of your head and onto the page. ‘My’ Barcelona is much an imaginary construct as any fantasy city (especially as I’d never been when I wrote the first novel). The Barcelona you find will, inevitably, be rather different.

Your protagonists – Tommy in Catfish Alley, Dexter in Casanova Street, and Rob in Diamond Boulevard – are all essentially ordinary people who get in over their heads. What interests you about writing these kinds of characters rather than professional criminals or detectives?

All three characters are pretty reprehensible. I set out to write protagonists you wouldn’t want your daughter to date. But equally, you’re inside their heads for an entire novel, and it’s important you can relate to them and their choices even if you don’t like them. Maybe you’d try and get hold of the entry codes to an art gallery if the alternative was returning home to the hellhole you grew up in; maybe you’d cut a few corners to get a promotion; or perhaps you’d connive in a heist at the building you worked in, if you’d been screwed over by your boss.

By contrast, it’s harder to make the detective interesting. They start on the side of good so you have to muss them up a little to make them believable or relatable – and that way lies the cliché of the hard-drinking loner cop.

It’s also difficult to make an out and out crook your protagonist. My novels feature some truly bad people – gangsters whose idea of a P45 is a bullet to the back of the head. The lack of empathy these characters display means it’s hard for the reader to truly identify with them. It can be done, but you’re swimming uphill all the time.

So for me, what works is an everyman – a bit of a dick sometimes, but aren’t we all – whose choices aren’t necessarily the readers, but aren’t so outlandish you automatically recoil from them.

You mentioned being inspired by classic heist films like Rififi for Diamond Boulevard. What’s the appeal of the heist genre, and what did you learn from those classic films about building tension?

There’s something about the mechanics of a heist which is undeniably appealing: the planning, the tensions among the crew, the inevitability of things going wrong after the heist even if they get away with the loot. Rififi, a French film from the 50s, is the touchstone for everything that followed: it includes a thirty-minute heist scene with no dialogue or music. And you can’t take your eyes off it. The viewer – and the reader, when you employ the techniques in a novel – becomes enthralled by the mechanics of the heist. You become so enwrapped in how the heist works that you forget you’re rooting for the crooks to pull it off.

You’ve described Casanova Street as an “old-fashioned noir tale” where readers will “have to find” the good guys. Do you enjoy playing with moral ambiguity? Is it important to you that readers don’t always know who to root for?

As a reader, I always find a milquetoast protagonist tedious. Much better for there to be some grit in the oyster. Each choice the protagonist makes should be reasonable in the moment, but the cumulative effect of successive choices should gradually erode their position. So in Casanova Street, our “hero” Dex doesn’t object to taking on a dubious client, and before he knows it, he’s in bed with the Russian mob.

Readers of my books often say they don’t know whether to be charmed by or despise my characters. A trade secret: I wrote the books and I don’t know either.

Your books seem to celebrate the seedier side of Barcelona – the shady streets, dodgy banks, criminal underworlds. How much research did you do on location? Were there any discoveries that particularly influenced the stories?

It’s important to start with the disclaimer that my personal experience of the items you mention is negligible. Any streets that looked remotely shady were only traversed in daylight; I’m sure there are organised criminals in Barcelona (perverse for the local police, the mossos d‘esquadra, to have an organised crime unit if not) but the Russian underworld is entirely the product of my imagination.

I did make a research trip after I’d written the second book, and this illustrates the glamour of the writer’s life: many of my discoveries related to bus routes, dustcarts and walking times.

I spent some time hanging out in the more residential parts of the city, especially Gràcia where the protagonists of Catfish Alley and Diamond Boulevard live. It was far from a hardship to spend time in these friendly, unpretentious streets.

It was essential for me to get the topography right. If you haven’t walked up to the Bunkers of Carmel you don’t realise what a bloody climb it is, and I redrafted a scene in Casanova Street after I’d done it. But once you have that skeleton in place, it gives you the confidence to make the more dramatic imaginative leaps – the gangsters, the shady cops and even shadier bankers.

Each of your three books has a very different crime at its centre – art theft, money laundering, diamond heist. Was it important to you that the trilogy covered different territory, or did the stories simply evolve that way?

I only ever intended to write one book, but once there was interest in Catfish Alley I thought it would be fun to write more. I didn’t want to repeat the crimes, and I’d always fancied a classic diamond heist. The robbery at the heart of Diamond Boulevard is based on a real event, which aficionados of true crime might recognise.

Who are you reading at the moment? Are there crime writers whose work particularly resonates with you?

I’ve just finished R. N. Morris’ excellent Cover Story, a clever and funny espionage novel which will appeal to fans of Mick Herron (like me).

Of course I read a lot of other crime writers too. Raymond Chandler defined noir as we understand it today; Richard Stark’s Parker novels have never been bettered in the “crook as protagonist” stakes; Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther books tap the potential of dropping a Chandleresque hero into Nazi Germany; and I love the lyricism of Chris Offutt’s Kentucky noir. Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series transcends the constraints of the police procedural.

The trilogy was published by Sharpe Books in summer 2025. Can you tell us what’s next? Will we see more of Barcelona, or are you tempted to explore other locations?

If you find out, let me know.