People always ask me why I chose to set Bait in Kenya. It’s a fair question, and my standard response is that there are no crocodiles in Newcastle.

I am only being slightly facetious. Crocs play a pivotal role in my debut novel. And without them I doubt I would ever have been published.

You see, Bait is the result of several years of abject failure. Its chief protagonists, Inspector Daniel Jouma and his erstwhile sidekick Jake Moore, originally started life as a pair of mismatched coppers on Tyneside – the Likely Lads in a Ford Mondeo.

Over the years they moved to London, changed departments, even briefly changed sex on one occasion in a bid to make them more attractive to agents and publishers. But like Terry and Bob in the classic 1970s sitcom they were destined to be left behind by the relentless march of progress.

The world of the 21st century crime thriller is one in which forensic science is king. Cops no longer need to solve murders with deduction and legwork, because if CCTV doesn’t catch the villain red handed then a DNA sample from one of his discarded nasal hairs most certainly will.

But what if you’re old school? What if you don’t want to be shackled by the appliance of science? What if you don’t understand it?

It became a big worry. I started thinking about alternatives. How about setting the story 200 years ago? No mobile phones or satnav, of course, but a whole raft of research headaches.

Then a few years ago I was in Kenya for a friend’s wedding. A guy had been run down and killed on the highway, but because they couldn’t agree in whose jurisdiction the body lay neither Mombasa nor Malindi police were prepared to attend the scene. Traffic just drove around the corpse. “Life is cheap in Kenya,” our driver said.

Can you imagine a similar occurrence in Britain? There would be ambulances, roadblocks, accident investigators, door-to-door inquiries, surveillance tapes, witness statements and everything else a modern European society would expect of a tragedy.

In Kenya, the normal rules do not apply. At that moment I knew I had the setting for my book.

It has become much more than that, of course. During the course of writing Bait, Kenya has become a character in itself. Its culture, history, people, and of course its crocodiles, have become as integral to the plot as Jake and Jouma.

After all the frustration it has been an incredibly liberating experience. I now wait to see whether the readers agree.

Read an extract from Bait.