The first impulse to embark on the Madden series came some years ago from an idle thought: How would the police have dealt with the problem posed by serial killers before they were recognized as such; before the very concept of forensic psychology had been developed? By chance, at about the same time, I was going through some old family albums and came across a scrapbook which my grandparents had kept in memory of their elder son who was killed in the First World War. Leafing through it I discovered something I hadn’t known before: The telegram they’d received advising them of his death had arrived in the same week as another telegram from the War Office informing them that their second son, my father, who like his brother was an officer in the British army, was missing. Fortunately he proved to have been captured, but I was struck by how appalling these twin blows must have seemed to them at the time.

From then on I began to read more about that terrible conflict and the deep scars it left on society. These two lines of thought came together and eventually led to the first of the Madden books, River of Darkness, in which the psychological damage inflicted on both protagonists, hunter and hunted, by their experiences in the trenches plays a major part in the story.

I decided early on, too, that I wouldn’t get trapped in a long series following the usual pattern of ‘another case for Inspector Madden.’ Rather, I wanted to place Madden and those around him, his family and colleagues at Scotland Yard, in the context of their time, and to see their lives develop quite apart from the mystery elements in each story. Hence the clear historical links which all three books have. The first, as I said, takes place in the shadow of the Great War; the second, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, against the rise of fascism in Germany and the looming threat of another war; while the third and most recent, The Dead of Winter, has the bombed-out ruins of London in the closing months of the Second World War as a backdrop.

It must have been 1998 when Bob, the owner and CEO, turned to me in a meeting at that big metal conference table in the corner office on the 2nd floor. “Eric,” he said slowly, staring at me, “do you think you can put together a spreadsheet?”

Bob was and is one of those deeply charismatic entrepreneurs, the kind of people who look at you and ask you to do something you can’t possibly do and to whom you inevitably find yourself saying, “Yes. Of course I can.”

Having put together many hundreds of spreadsheets since that day in 1998, Bob’s request does not now seem particularly grand. But, at the time, it was a big—even ridiculous—request, made when we were trying to raise money from investors to keep Bob’s company afloat.

First of all, our accounting software had essentially broken down. There was no simple way to find meaningful numbers about the company sales or expenses, let alone put them in a spreadsheet for potential investors.

The second problem was more serious: Even if there were numbers to pull from a functional accounting system, I had no understanding of finance. And no ability to create a spreadsheet. I was an arts major in charge of the production of city guides, business directories and Web sites. But Bob turned to me because the various financial people who’d already tried to put together a spreadsheet had all failed. I was good with computers, Bob figured. I knew how the company worked. The lack of financial understanding would just have to be overcome.

And then there was the third problem: The company was broke. I hadn’t known this until just a few months or weeks before that meeting in the conference room, even though I’d been at the company for many years. As part of the team pursuing investors, however, I’d been invited into the upper reaches of executive management. And a key step in the ritual of admission to the inner circle was the revelation of the fact that the company was, in effect, bankrupt.