James Marrison is the author of The Drowning Ground, a Cotswolds thriller with a half-Argentine leading character

I have been living in Argentina on and off for the last 18 years but I was born in Oxford and grew up in Kirtlington. I also went to school at St Edward’s and my mother was a teacher for many years, first in Oxford and then in Chipping Norton.

My love of detective fiction began when I watched Edward Dmytryk’s film version of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely on television when I was skiving off from school.

This passion for film noir and hard-boiled fiction quickly grew when I was lucky enough to study film noir at Amherst College while an undergraduate exchange student at The University of Massachusetts.

It was pretty much straight after that that I knew I wanted to be a writer.

It took me about 20 years on and off to actually become a published author though.

I started writing seriously when I was about 23 while living first in Turkey and then in Oxford and Argentina. I used to teach English as a foreign language and used to teach 20 hours a week and then write another 20 hours a week in my free time.

I sent in my first novel to agents and publishers and must have got about 150 rejections. I found out later that this is a kind of badge of honour among most published writers.

At the time though, I thought it was time to have a look at another career and quickly got into journalism and eventually ended up specialising in true crime stories. But I also swore to myself that I would have another go at another novel before I turned 40.

The Drowning Ground took about three or four years to write in between other writing projects and elements of the story are based on real life events I have covered while working as a true crime writer. I worked very closely with my agent and the hardest thing to get right was not the story itself but the leading man Detective Chief Inspector Guillermo Downes.

But living in Argentina gives me something to write about and the moment I figured out that Downes should be a half-Argentine exile living in England then it kind of clicked.

Living abroad for so long always feels a little like you are on the outside looking in and I gave Downes that trait.

Downes is also always homesick and this is something I often feel myself. In fact ,when I first moved to Argentina I used to spend a lot of time watching old Morse episodes on cable television!

I also carried out a lot of research on the so-called Dirty War where 30,000 Argentines were murdered by the military junta from 1976 to 1983.

They are called ‘los desaparecidos’ (the disappeared) as no one knows what happened to them as their bodies were never recovered.

And I used that as a back story for Downes.

I am now in the very fortunate position of being able to focus entirely on writing for the first time.

I have just completed a novella which tells the story of how DCI Guillermo Downes was hunted by Argentina’s military junta during the dictatorship and fled to England and I have now handed in the first draft of the second Downes novel to my publishers. It is called (for now) The Sleepless Ones and is scheduled for publication next summer.