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In the opening pages of my novel Bait, some poor sod is tied to a fighting chair on the back of a game fishing boat and eviscerated with a gutting knife.

Later a character is attacked by crocodiles, the remains of another are washed up on a paradise beach after being blown to smithereens, and, by means of a finale, a particularly nasty piece of work is turned into mincemeat by the screws of a high-powered speedboat.

For the crime writer, who exists to invent ever-more cruel and unusual death, Kenya is a goldmine– which is why I chose to set my debut crime thriller in Mombasa rather than Peckham.

And Detective Inspector Daniel Jouma and his English sidekick Jake Moore had better get used to exotic murder, because I've got plenty more of it in store for them in the sequel, Burn, which is out next year.

Another benefit about a Kenyan setting is the comparatively unsophisticated level of criminal investigation, even in the big cities. Detectives exist, but they have none of the technological razzmatazz commonplace in America or Great Britain.

The freedom from CCTV, CSI, DNA and all the other strait-jacketing instruments of detection is exhilarating. It's like returning to the golden days when cops solved crimes with legwork and brain-power – and on a purely selfish level it saves hours of research into scientific minutiae.

A friend of mine, who is also a crime writer, recently told me his new book is to be about the hunt for a serial killer in a drab industrial town in the Midlands. I wished him luck, of course – but I also felt terribly sorry for him, because I have been to that town and there isn't a crocodile to be found.

Bait by Nick Brownlee is published by Piatkus