Goodreads asked Phil Lecomber:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Phil Lecomber "Mask of the Verdoy" is set in London in the 1930s - a period that I've been fascinated with for many years now. The gritty realism of writers such as Patrick Hamilton, Norman Collins, Robert Westerby, James Curtis, and to some extent Graham Greene, drew me to setting the series in the interwar period, and to give a narrative voice to both the working class and to those on the outskirts of society. But it was a chance encounter with a Gerald Kersh short-story in my early teens, and the subsequent hunting down of his novels, that really fixed this historical setting as a backdrop to the Harley Mysteries. Then throw in the Blackshirts, street slang, seedy Soho night clubs, Jazz, a sense of the uncanny and the smoggy backstreets of the West End ... well, the idea was to write something that I'd find interesting myself to read.

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