Novelist and film critic Dennis Broe takes a critical look at the pornography and gambling industries – the new bread and circuses being moldy bread and virtual circuses

I began my career as a travel writer, writing both books and pieces for newspapers. For the books, I always travelled alone, undoubtedly the best way of finding stories. With the journalism, there was always the temptation of the easy route to information, the press trip, where you’d be in a party of other travel hacks being taken round chosen sites by a PR working for a travel company.

We had the idea to do this one a good while ago, but it’s taken some time to get it off the ground – as these things do sometimes.            When thinking about subjects for crime anthologies, honestly this kept coming back to us again and again. After all, what better motive for criminal activity than this one – everybody experiences feelings of jealously and anger in their lives, often directed at someone who’s wronged them (not that we’re advocating doing anything about it in real life, obviously). But the scope is pretty huge for it fiction-wise, as we certainly found out when we began getting the stories in.

My latest police-procedural murder mystery Phantom at the Feast (No Exit Press) marks the return of Detective Sergeant Rex King of Holborn Police Station in Central London. If you read the first novel in this series, The Fountain in the Forest, you will know that DS King is far from perfect. But go to any of the UK’s growing number of crime-fiction festivals and you’ll hear a frequent cry from writers of contemporary crime and thriller novels that, ‘It’s not Dixon of Dock Green out there anymore!’