‘I still dream that I’m a copper and I’m late for shift’

The bestselling crime writer talks about learning his craft on The Bill, turning police memories into fiction, finding success with Heck and why even an established author can feel as though he is back at day one.

Paul Finch left Greater Manchester Police more than three decades ago, but the job has not entirely left him. “I still sometimes have dreams that I’m a copper and I’m late for shift,” he says. It is a wonderfully ordinary anxiety for a writer whose novels tend to favour serial offenders, isolated landscapes and villains of spectacular unpleasantness. Even in sleep, amid all that imagined darkness, Finch is apparently worrying about the rota.

The former officer, journalist and television writer has built an unusually broad career. He is best known for his thrillers featuring Detective Sergeant Mark “Heck” Heckenburg, along with the Lucy Clayburn novels, but his shelves also contain horror, fantasy, science fiction and historical adventures. There have been scripts for The Bill, audio dramas connected with Doctor Who and, by his own cheerful estimate, a vast number of short stories. He thinks he has written about 15 or 16 novels, though the total seems less important to him than the habit itself.

“I do work a lot,” he says, sounding faintly apologetic about it. “It’s just what I love doing. I find myself writing at weekends and in the evenings, which Kath doesn’t always think is a good idea. But being able to do what you love and get paid for it is such an advantage.”

Writing was not his first profession, although it was present in the family. Finch’s father moved from the forces and local journalism into television, writing for Coronation Street and later Heartbeat. When the younger Finch was interviewed for the police, he was asked whether he intended to follow the same route. He said no and meant it. He had seen the business at close quarters and could not imagine a way into it. Police work, by contrast, seemed practical, immediate and satisfyingly connected to a longstanding fascination with crime and detection.

His history degree made him an oddity among new recruits in the middle of the 1980s. On his first team, he says, he was the only person without a military background. Colleagues kept asking what someone with a degree was doing there. Finch had no grand answer. Ancient and medieval history fascinated him, but the obvious career options seemed limited. The police offered experience, purpose and, as it turned out, an extraordinary supply of stories.

His first day in uniform brought one of them. A man approached him quietly in a Salford street, warned that a bookmaker’s would be robbed shortly before closing on Friday, then walked away. Finch passed the information to detectives. An attempted robbery followed and the offenders were caught. He doubts the informant would have spoken if officers had been wearing body cameras.

The service he joined, he says, was closer in spirit to The Sweeney than to modern policing. It was more physical, less observed and considerably less accountable. Finch is not nostalgic about everything that implies, but he remains fascinated by the private culture of the station. “Police life is unique,” he says. “What goes on behind the scenes in police stations stays behind the scenes unless people bring it into fiction.” He has mined his own relatively short service, and the stories passed on by other officers, ever since.

Before long, experience was producing an urge stronger than professional duty. “I realised I wanted to write about it rather than do it,” he says. He supplied his father with police stories for Heartbeat and checked scripts for procedural detail. His own attitude to accuracy has always included a certain flexibility. A former detective inspector once observed in a review that Finch played as fast and loose with procedure as a novelist as he had as an officer. Finch regards this as an excellent summary.

He left the police while still young enough to change direction and trained as a newspaper reporter. Journalism taught him the practical discipline of putting words in order, meeting deadlines and making himself understood. At the same time, he began sending speculative scripts to The Bill. For six months, nothing came back. Then he tried a different approach and wrote an original screenplay called Knock Off Job, about a murder inside a police station. A script editor telephoned and invited him in.

The screenplay itself was optioned but never made, an outcome Finch would encounter often enough, but it opened the door that mattered. The production was intrigued to discover that its author was a serving officer. He arrived when The Bill was at its height and found himself coached by what he considers one of the best script departments in British television. “I kind of learned to write there and then, on the spot,” he says. His police years supplied the ground; the programme taught him how to build on it.

Finch is cautious about the idea that technique alone can manufacture a writer. He sees value in creative writing courses, particularly in showing students what a writing life requires, but believes the initial compulsion must already be present. Novel writing is a formidable physical task before the problems of narrative, character and pace have even begun. Talent is not enough either. The profession demands tenacity and an ability to hear no repeatedly without mistaking it for a final verdict.

When he was trying to move further into film and television, rejection became so familiar that he imagined calling a future autobiography They Always Say No. Most of the film scripts he wrote were never made. By then, however, The Bill had given him an agent and a body of broadcast work. That early foothold spared him one difficulty, though he is realistic about what representation can do. An agent handles contracts and becomes a point of contact, he says, but the work itself must persuade people.

He left The Bill around 2003 as the series moved towards soap opera and the television landscape changed around it. Finch expected his credits to make the next stage straightforward. They did not. There was welcome work on Doctor Who audio dramas, but also a period of uncertainty. His agent kept suggesting a crime novel. Finch resisted. After years of police drama, he wanted fantasy, science fiction and almost anything else.

Two American television series changed his mind. The Wire and, especially, The Shield offered police characters who were effective, morally compromised and impossible to file neatly under hero or villain. Finch did not want the elegant puzzles of Morse, nor a simple imitation of Dirty Harry. He wanted something between those traditions, fast, muscular and ethically awkward. His agent told him to write it. Heck was the result.

The character is a detective sergeant who bends rules with enthusiasm, works largely alone and remains uncorrupted even when his methods become alarming. The first novel, Stalkers, appeared in 2013 and seemed to be everywhere. Avon placed it in supermarkets, supported it with publicity and helped turn it into a bestseller. Finch is proud of the book but candid about the role of timing and belief. “You need the stars to align,” he says. “It needs to be the right editor and the right publisher, with a slot on their list that you will fit.”

Police readers responded particularly warmly. One detective sergeant contacted him to ask whether Heck was real and, if so, whether Finch could introduce them. He suspects the character represented the officer many readers wished they could be. Heck’s appeal also rests on his complicated relationship with Gemma, a former girlfriend who rises to detective superintendent while he remains a sergeant. Their personal and professional tension, Finch says, is “a gift that keeps giving”.

The National Crime Group in the novels allowed him to move Heck around Britain, shifting between cities, villages, coastlines and the Highlands. Finch later joked that the real National Crime Agency had borrowed his idea. The travelling brief also prevented the series from becoming visually or emotionally static. Each book could inhabit a different force, landscape and atmosphere while the central characters remained familiar enough to begin speaking for themselves.

Success did not remove uncertainty. Publishing, in Finch’s account, is a succession of changing editors, shifting priorities and occasional stretches when an author wonders whether the momentum has vanished. Electronic books brought one upheaval, self publishing another, while artificial intelligence and the prominence of celebrity novelists continue to alter the trade. A publisher can promise more than it delivers. A bad review can travel. An enthusiastic editor can leave.

The hardest moments are the gaps between publishers. Finch prefers the traditional relationship and dislikes writing into a silence, unsure whether a finished novel will find a reader. During Covid, while responses slowed and projects stalled, he turned to the period that had fascinated him since university. The result was a group of historical adventures including Usurper, Battle Lord, The Devil’s Knight and The Dark Army. His readership there may be smaller than the one for his thrillers, but the books allowed him to use knowledge that had been waiting patiently since his student days.

For all his range, he admits that Heck remains the character he most naturally enjoys writing. Those novels now feel like second nature. Their taste for fast cars, hard policing and formidable villains may sit a little apart from the current fashion for gentle amateur sleuths. “At the moment we’ve got grandmas’ knitting clubs solving murder mysteries,” he says, with amusement rather than complaint. “The days of fast police cars chasing through inner cities and guns blazing feel a little bit out of time. But they could come back. Of course they will.”

His recent standalone thrillers, The Island and The Lodge, move away from a recurring police lead without becoming noticeably safer. Finch pitched the first as “Agatha Christie on steroids”. It sends a group of disgraced former officers to a luxury retreat on the Isles of Scilly, where isolation, old secrets and a body in the harbour rapidly spoil the holiday. The Lodge leans further into gothic horror, trapping a dark tourism group inside a remote Forest of Bowland mansion filled with relics from a horror film legend.

The settings may change, but Finch’s interests remain consistent: enclosed communities, compromised authority, extreme pressure and the question of what people do when official protection disappears. Crime, horror and history are less separate territories in his work than neighbouring rooms. He moves between them according to the story, carrying the same appetite for pace and moral difficulty through each doorway.

There is no pretence that the career has been smooth. Finch has known rejected scripts, unmade films, stalled projects and books written without any certainty of publication. Yet his answer to inertia has remained strikingly simple. He writes. On good days, that means exercising a gift, earning a living and reaching readers. On difficult ones, it means continuing until the industry catches up.

“We all reach points where we feel we’re flogging a dead horse,” he says. Even the most successful writers, he suspects, must sometimes believe that nothing will work. Luck matters, as do promotion, timing and an editor prepared to fight for a book. The consoling fact is that he is still doing the thing he wanted to do when police experience first began pressing itself into stories. He may occasionally dream that he is late for shift, but in waking life Paul Finch has been turning up at the desk for years.