I was at an event the other day, chatting to a woman I’d just met, when we got onto the subject of our childhood obsessions. We’d both been pony-mad, and dissected our love of horses at length. Then she told me that, aged ten, she and two of her friends had started their own ‘detective agency’, where they attempted to unpick unsolved crimes. It reminded me that I’d once had a similar obsession. Each weekend, I’d head off to the newsagents, with my £1 pocket money burning a hole in my jeans, desperate for a new ‘true crime’ book; those flimsy paperbacks with black-and-white crime-scene photos on the front, usually written by someone else obsessed with a long-forgotten event. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that, at nine years old, I shouldn’t have been reading them – but this was the 80s, and parenting was somewhat different.
I’d rush my purchase home and pore over it, quite convinced that if I just gave these unsolved mysteries the full power of my attention, the answer would reveal itself to me.