This week, BritCrime is being curated by the great crime writer David Mark, who has asked crime writers to write A Day in the Life. This is mine:

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It starts badly. I have a couple of hours before I go to catch my train and plan to tidy my desk. It’s a once-a-year task. I’ve just finished a draft of a novel so it seems the right time to put the rest of my life into order.

And right away, in the huge mound of paper behind my computer I find a German contract I’ve been supposed to have signed. Crap. So I fill in the form and go out to the post box just as the rain starts to fall. In a few seconds, hunching over to try and keep the envelope dry, I’m completely soaked.

It’s still raining by the time I catch the 12.38 to Northwich. Tonight, I’m a guest of the Northwich LitFest, one of those small literary festivals that scrape by on a mixture of enthusiasm and local goodwill. When I get off the Brighton train at Victoria I discover I’ve left my ticket behind. Rush back to my seat to find the cleaner has already added it to her bin bag. Try and catch up with her but she’s just dumped everything into the the rubbish truck on the platform. ‘Nothing I can do,’ she says sympathetically.

So it costs £84 to replace a £52 ticket to travel to a small Cheshire literary festival, because, the man behind the glass window explains, it’s not an advance ticket any more.

Normally I love working on trains. I wrote the bulk of A Song From Dead Lips on the commuter train from Brighton. Today I had been planning to use the journey to tinker with ideas for a new book but now I’m in such a filthy mood I can’t concentrate. From Stockport I catch a rickety diesel train through lush Cheshire countryside. Having left Brighton in rain, Cheshire is boiling and I’m sweltering next to a heater which is on full blast.

I often think that being a novelist, jostling for audience, turning out for events you’re never sure will be attended by anyone who actually likes your work, is a bit like being one of those bands I used to write about when I was a pop journalist. They would talk about how they dragged themselves across America playing clubs in Kansas to crowds of three people.

But the festival organiser’s husband picks me up at the station and it’s hard to remain sullen. Northwich Litfest is run by novelist Susi Osborne; like all small literature festivals it’s a labour of love. At the venue, Susi is nervous. She worries that not many tickets have been sold. England are playing Slovakia. Who would come to see a literary event on a warm Monday evening like this? She hadn’t thought of that when she booked the event. It’s going to be hard to get any crowd at all. To try and make her feel better I tell her about the time last year when me, Elly Griffiths, Susan Wilkins and Lesley Thomson turned up at Crawley Waterstones for an event and only one person turned up. And we smiled at her benignly, because every reader is important, until she produced her own self-published novel that she wanted to tell us about.

But fifteen minutes before the event at a small, local library, people start arriving. People who hadn’t booked are paying on the door. And in a few minutes all the chairs laid out are full. Susi’s smiling. So I sit on a blue armchair on an Elmer The Elephant rug in the children’s section and start to talk about why I love writing crime fiction. And after all the stress of getting there everything’s suddenly simple. People listen and laugh obligingly when I say something half-funny. They ask flattering questions. They say generous things. They talk engagingly about the books they love. There’s even a birdwatcher in the audience who nods sagely when I talk about my book, The Birdwatcher, and the research I did. And afterwards they queue to buy books and have them signed. It turns out to a delightful evening. And after everything, I’m really glad I travelled the 250 miles to get here.

On 18 May 2016 we threw a great party at Goldsboro Books. Jon Riley, editor in chief at riverrun, gave a really sweet toast and it felt like a great way to launch the book into the world.