I’m a New Zealander who always wanted to write novels. I nearly had one published when I was younger, but hard luck! Instead, I graduated in law, worked as a lawyer in private practice, as a senior crown counsel in Hong Kong, and then as a senior executive in the British Gas Corporation.

I had my first novel, a modest thriller entitled A Smell of Fraud published in 1976. Although I was always writing something, the pressures of earning a living took priority and it wasn’t until 2005 that The Predators, another thriller was published.

I found the time to chair the national drug rehabilitation charity Phoenix House for seven years and to chair the community service charity Charterhouse-in-Southwark. I held posts in the International Bar Association and was a member of the government’s Monopolies/ Competition Commission. But writing was what I really wanted to do. My travels in the east gave me the material for Teaching Yourself Tranquillity, 2007, a non-spiritual approach to meditation.

In 2008 I was back with fiction. Caring for Cathy is a black comedy about the tears and laughs in my experience of caring for a person with a degenerative disease. Blue Lantern, 2009, which arises from my adventures in Hong Kong is about police corruption, and Present Tense, 2010, deals with a woman confronted by her rapist of many years before.

My latest effort is non-fiction, The Happy Humanist. My daughter (a psychologist) saw an untitled early draft and asked me why I wrote it. I said “It’s what I believe.” She replied, “Dad, people don’t want stewed prunes. They want apple pie.” She was right. So The Happy Humanist was refocused around what it takes to be at one with ourselves, and I think it is all the better for that.

I continue to live and write in Fulham, London. It’s quiet enough now that my children are grown up - but I do have four grandchildren!