Goodreads asked Daniel Pembrey:

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

Daniel Pembrey I have a close sister living in Amsterdam so I’d visit often and struggle to find good crime fiction set there, which surprised me. I felt that Amsterdam lent itself as well to the genre as the neighbouring Scandinavian capitals, where of course crime fiction is huge! So finally I decided to create a Dutch detective character: Henk van der Pol, The Harbour Master (as the series was named).

I lived in the docklands area of Amsterdam for several months to capture his voice and physical world. I spent a lot of time in bars and cafes listening to locals and watching how they interacted. It wasn’t all bad, but getting up at dawn on wintery mornings to peruse the harbour (as Henk does) took some getting used to!

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