Philippa Marsh

I was clerk to a parish council outside York for twenty-six years, which is the finest training for a crime writer that exists. Every murder in my books has a motive I once saw minuted. My detective, Margaret Oddie, is a retired bell-ringer who notices things because nobody notices her. I write at the kitchen table of a narrow house off Bishopthorpe Road, with a view of a wall and a very old cat called Inspector. I have been married to a patient man named Graham since 1990, and I walk the city walls every morning to plot.