A funny thing happened to me on the way to writing my latest book, Bethulia. It’s a book in which, just for once, I feature a police investigation, and the opening sequence of that section portrays a young female police detective being treated disparagingly by a male senior officer, who exhibits decidedly misogynistic and racist tendencies.

I belong to a writing groups, and when I offered up an early version of this chapter to them for criticism, they suggested that it was all too much of a cliché, and that police just weren’t allowed to behave like that any more. I didn’t want to make my DS Gray any less obnoxious but I did make changes to suggest that he was on the point of retirement and using the opportunity to be objectionable, but that he was a painful exception in his attitudes. Because, of course, my fellow writers were…