As we all know, that time is coming in a few weeks. Not my favourite season, but it’s going to happen regardless.

However, it does mean presents and books make great gifts. So please forgive a few weeks of shameless self-promotion ahead…

For the last few years I’ve focused to the Tom Harper and Simon Westow books – I’m working on the sixth book with Simon and Jane, and the big news is that my publisher has accept Rusted Souls, the 11^th and final book in the Tom Harper series. It’ll be out next autumn.

Before those, though, was another series, the first of my published novels, with Richard Nottingham, Constable of Leeds, as the main character. His family were important in the books, especially his daughter Emily, and also his deputy, John Sedgwick.

They’re set in Leeds, but in the 1730s, just as the town is grown wealthy off the wool trade. Well, the merchants are. For ordinary people, life is always a battle. It’s a small place, around 7,000 people, dominated by Kirkgate and Briggate.

Richard lives on Marsh Lane, crossing Timble Bridge, down near the Parish Church, to come to the jail. That’s by the top of Kirkgate, next to the White Swan on the corner of Briggate.

It was, perhaps, an unusual setting for a series of crime novels. But Leeds is my home. I feel it and I wanted to bring the place to life, to make readers feel they’d walked the streets, heard the voice, smell all the stink of life. All in the framework of a crime novel.

What many don’t know is that Richard Nottingham was real. He was the constable from 1717-1737, although it would be a largely ceremonial role in reality. He was a somewhat elusive figure in life. I spent time trying to track him down and wrote about it here – there’s just enough to be fascinating and make me want to known much more.

There are seven books in the series. Each one of them received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, which I’m told is very rare. Although virtually all are out of print in hardback, most are available in paperback. All are there as ebooks in every format. The Broken Token is also an audiobook (and one of the Independent on Sunday’s Audiobooks of the Year for 2012).

I have a very soft spot for Richard, and not just because he helped me into this fiction business. He’s a genuinely good man, someone I could wish to be. People still occasionally ask if I’ll write another with him. I won’t. At the end of Free From All Danger I left him happy. He deserves that.

If you haven’t tried him, please take a look. The ebooks are pretty cheap, and they’ll fill a dark winter evening. For those who are squeezed…ask the library; they should have them in stock to borrow.