I live in West Wales – have lived here for more than 35 years, and I find it easy to use as a setting for my domestic noir novels. But just to season the brew I have also made use of the town where I was born and lived for nearly 30 years. Luton, Bedfordshire, 32 miles north of London, on the M1, trains to St Pancras and, of course, Luton airport. A town squeezed into a gap in the Chilterns, chalk downs that I still miss.

Luton is not an obvious setting for intense domestic drama or gritty urban thrillers – at least it wasn’t when I left it, back in the 80s. Might have changed by now, of course. The Luton I remember was a town that went out of its way to be non-descript, the epitome of suburban, too close to London to establish an identity of…