I was interested to read somewhere that you said that whenever you first wrote the first book, and you self-published it, I think, at the beginning, that you were told that you shouldn't be writing about someone with ASD.

Yeah, I was told by, well, my first agent, my agency, who I'd been with for 40 years, turned me down, which just goes to show there's no such thing as loyalty in the agenting world.

And then I approached a couple of other, three other literary agents, And they all turned me down because they said publishers wouldn't touch me because I wasn't autistic and because my children weren't autistic.

I would be accused of neuroscientific appropriation and they would be worried that readers would reject me.

So I said to my wife, right, you know, I've done so much work on this and I actually think it's a proper, you know, respectful portrayal.

I'm going to look into self-publishing, which has become such a phenomenon and I'm going to self-publish.

And if I'm pushed back by the autistic community, then I'll stop and I'll drop George.

How did that inform your writing? Did it affect the way you wrote, having the experience that you've come from?

And so where did you acquire your, you know, is this something you learned when you were writing it or did you already know all that?

no a lot of it i learned when i was writing but i've always been obsessed with books and when i was at school i used to kind of prowl the secondhand bookshops of bristol of which there are very few now since the internet's come along secondhand bookshops sort of died to death and i lived in surrey um and there's a a town called guildford that had this wonderful bookshop called Thorpes and it was about eight stories it was like this emporium of of secondhand books and and I just was fascinated you know what I bought a triple edition triple volume of Henry James's portrait of lady from the year after it was published for about two quid I don't know what it's worth now.

So I was always interested in that.

And also, if you think about book selling, if you've got a rare first edition of an Ernest Hemingway or an Evelyn Waugh, that's fabulous.

And it's worth money.

If you've got an Evelyn Waugh that's signed by Evelyn Waugh, That's worth even more money.

If you've got an Evelyn Waugh that is signed to my dear friend Graham Greene from Evelyn Waugh, it's worth even more.

is a suit.

Has it changed what you wear? Has it changed how you think about your clothing?

yeah i mean i um there are two separate suits one is i commissioned a suit from richie charlton um which is the three piece you'll see on my instagram to do research this one yeah that that's the first fitting for that suit so he's measured me and that's the the suit with the base stitching you can see um and and kind of figuring out how it's going to go But we have a competition with Bloomsbury where you have a chance to win a £1,200 suit from the lovely Taylor's King and Allen.

All you have to do is sign up.

You don't even have to buy the bloody book.

There's an opportunity for you.

Yeah, I mean, I kind of, you know, when I came to writing crime fiction quite late, you know, in my 60s, And one thing I did think, you know, you've got to be quite visible.

And I've spent my entire life in the creative industries and I like clothes, but I've never had an opportunity to wear a suit.

Or had you

And just what do you think it is about him that people have taken to heart, that people want to read more about him again and again?

I think it's a few things.

As I said, because he's on the spectrum, he's very dogged and patient in following evidence and nothing more than that.

And I think that he's got enormous integrity.

He's got what we used to call Asperger's, but now it's called ASC.

And often people on the spectrum have a need for things to be right, to be done in the right way.

So he's a great advocate for protocol, but also the need for things to be right is perfect for a detective because he needs to solve the crime to make it right, to provide justice for the victim and also mete out justice for whoever's perpetrated the crime.

And how does that inform, how did working on that inform what you do

Mm.

"If the neurotypical push back, I won't care so much." And quite the opposite happened.

And we published the book, uh, self-published the book, and within four months we'd had almost 200,000 downloads, and so many emails from people saying, "My son is autistic.

How did you get inside his head? I have an autistic friend.

I've now read George and I understand more about this condition." I've had emails from autistic people, people on the spectrum saying, "It's so wonderful to see someone on the spectrum portrayed in such a positive way, that their autism is portrayed in such an authentic way." It's been really humbling.

It wasn't something that I expected, and I now feel a great sense of responsibility for it.

But at the same time, I think that, you know, with George, his condition is his gift.

Fantastic.

So your intro into the film industry, I've read somewhere, maybe on your wiki page, that you ended up with a job as a chauffeur on Brideshead Revisited.

Is that correct? Yeah, that's true.

I'd actually my father was it's a kind of long story, but I'll be brief.

My father had wanted me to become a lawyer and he insisted that I change my degree at university.

And so I had to do four years at university, which really annoyed me.

What he didn't understand was that in the fourth year, A friend of mine said to me, I've got two mates.

He was a mature student.

Brighton Pavilion.

So clearly you like getting out and about with your readers.

Yeah.

And that one was actually particularly good.

You know, it's a suburb of Cardiff.

And about 80 people came.

And what was lovely was it's a library that was going to close down.

And then a lot of the sort of local residents, quite a lot of the affluent ones, the barristers and doctors went, no, no, no, no, you're not doing that.

But in particular, in terms of the policing work, it means he's highly logical and not prone to sort of emotional... sides that you get from the other characters in the police.

How would you describe George for people if they haven't picked up a George book yet?

Well, I think they're, you know...

The thing about George is his persistence and his integrity and his need for things to be done correctly.

And this is all part of the fact that he's on the spectrum, which kind of fits into tradition.

If you think about it, you know, August Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Poirot.

I think these days we put all of them on the spectrum and it lends itself to detective work in a sense.

You know, George, George is someone who doesn't have gut instincts about a case.

And when he gets an idea of something that needs doing, he'll invariably try and do it by himself.

Bullied?

Yeah, essentially.

I think you could say that.

That would be a fair way to describe, um, how they were perceiving their, uh, treatment by the other members of the school board.

And, uh, one after another, they re- uh, resigned.

Um, and one of the members of the school board, Diana Johnson, I spoke to really extensively, and she said, "Look, they are trying to get people who don't have the exact same value system that they do to resign, so that they can install people that they want to have on the school board, who are very, very aligned with their, um, political viewpoint," which unfortunately is, is not supposed to be part of these non-partisan jobs.

And, um, Steve, I think last year when I was on here, I said, "You, you, you served in a non-partisan role.

But then there, we actually got corrected that there ended up only being one parent, that after, like, they got more information, there ended up only, only being one parent that was opted out.

To me, this kind of uncharted life was the best kind to have, and it was even better that it required a sunbonnet.

She taught at three schools.

The, the first one was the Brewster School, and that's where Almanzo would, uh, take her down and pick her up.

It was about 12 miles to the southwest.

It's the place where the family survived the long winter, and it was the place she always considered home.

So when she talked about walking through the cool, uh, ground, walking to the, the prairie school, if you see when we're going home, it's wet there.

That's why it would've been cool.