There are several pints of Saxon peasant-blood in the writer known as Percy Stewart, but he has lived far from East Anglia for so many years that he now simply puts on his Norfolk wellies when it suits him.

If anything, he might be closer to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, the home of his favourite beer, Greene King IPA...the original which others have worked so hard to copy.

'Greene King was one of the local ales which I first tasted in shandy long before I was old enough to drink beer.  My favourite was half a pint of bitter shandy and a packet of Smiths Crisps sitting outside a pub while the men in our local brass band downed as many pints as they could, standing at the bar.

'I loved the magic of unwrapping a little blue paper packet of salt, then shaking the crisps in their bag until every one of them was nicely-seasoned. 

'Those childhood days in the sixties were all very rose-tinted. Even the rain on our caravan holidays at Heacham and Hunstanton was warm.'

'In 1970 I went from this kindly, encouraging Fenland community to an 'old-boys' school regime built on rugby and bullying.  I couldn't wait to get on my bicycle back to that little backwater, where the other fish were so friendly.

'You could say that my life ever since then has been a search for a real home. This longing for home is an undercurrent which flows beneath all three novels, providing a lot of the emotional tension.'

Having no truly fixed home, Percy Stewart finds it very easy to channel that unquenched energy into whatever is needed in a particular part of the books. It drives the whole of Jacques' emotional and physical quest.

'When I got married in the late eighties, the house was only supposed to be a temporary port of call and from the first day to the last, I never regarded it as my own home. Eventually it became plain that it was suffocating the life out of me and the day I left, I couldn't believe how good it felt to breathe fresh air.'

'I'm certain that if I had ever settled somewhere permanently, this process of transformation would never have occurred. I'm very grateful to have never had children, even though I have loved lots of children very much in my work, and in friends' families.

'I couldn't see myself in a writer's shed at the bottom of the garden...though I should never say never, perhaps! I'm still a romantic idealist at heart. It would depend on the location and the company, I suppose.

'In my early twenties I did a lot of writing which somehow never seemed genuine, so I threw it all away.

'If I were ever to settle down and build a cosy shed at the bottom of a lovely, flowery garden, with a little stove and a kettle which whistles when it comes to the boil, I would have to write happy children's stories filled with sunshine and laughter.

'Different lifestyles seem to generate different kinds of writer. I'm sure that this is why so much ephemeral writing seems like a fake...because it is. If I were to write romantic novels under a female pseudonym, no doubt I could fill the pages with steamy sex, but it would all be from memory and the forgery would show through in the lack of any real substance and context. Perhaps to our mutual great loss, I have never swept a partner off her feet and fucked her on the kitchen table...so if I wrote about it, the scene would obviously have been cribbed from a film.'

'It's certainly one reason why novels written in languages other than English can have such a deep emotional impact on me...something such as El amor en los tiempos del colèra by Gabriel Garcia Marques.

'As natives of the British Isles, I think many of us tend to be visitors rather than true travellers, which generates a completely different kind of art.

'When I'm with my European friends near the Spanish Border, I feel completely at home within a more fluid way of life. I've sensed this spirit of adventure in the Western Isles of Scotland, too, for similar oceanic reasons. Celtic musicians can make great travellers...it's in their blood, along with a very profound sense of home which has nothing to do with the size of their mortgage.'

In Percy Stewart's early teens, this longing for home and the romantic life in it became some kind of fantasy-home, near Lyme Regis in Dorset.

'Even now, the very name 'Uplyme' makes my heart race, remembering the warm wave of feelings which washed through me whenever I received a letter from my first big love, a girl who went away to boarding-school.'

'I remember lying awake with her school photo pressed to my heart, gazing in wonder at the stars in the night-sky, sending telepathic messages to a flying-saucer, hoping that some kindly aliens would whisk me away and deposit me in another room, hundreds of miles further south. This was the early seventies, and anything was possible, even without LSD.

'Five years later, all of the thwarted romanticism of my Lyme Bay letters found a productive outlet.  Writing about 'Nature' and human nature won me a place at Cambridge, but at the time I lacked the confidence to realise how significant this would eventually become.

'Now in Pilgrim I have been able to poke fun at my own foolishness by passing it on to Jacques, leaving the reader to guess what is true and what is sheer fantasy.'

'At Cambridge, I was unprepared for academic study, because our teachers gave us no guidance on study techniques, or even on how to write a convincing essay.  In any case, my interests were always in the world outside my window.  I love books, but I love life even more!'

'It horrifies me that two generations later, young people still have exactly the same problems, with so many teachers and careers-advisors who only seem to know how to perpetuate their own narrow-minded systems.

'We should be employing carpenters, cooks and chiropodists to go into schools and teach the kids about interesting jobs in the world outside, not channeling them into universities and degrees which have no relevance other than filling a three-year gap on a c.v. which might one day be rejected at an interview for a job selling hamburgers.'

'One of the best decisions made by my ex-wife was to get rid of our television.  I love watching a good film, but I am certain that having no television for most of the time since 1976 has played a huge part in preserving precious memories, and in sharpening my sense of independence. Watching the news every day for a couple of years in the eighties was really getting to me and now I only hear tiny scraps from one or two friends.'

'Decades ago I realised that I am a sponge for new ideas.  I recognised the dangers of spending my life watching a box which plays mind-altering tricks with sound and light.

'Two years ago I cancelled my internet contract so that at home, usage was only for essentials, on a small phone-screen. My ten to twenty year-old Macs have the necessary software to do all of my professional work without being connected to the outside world, which I find much the best way to write and compose.'

'In March it seemed that I had to buy an iPad for essentials on the journey and now for various reasons I have begun to use it on a daily basis. Soon I found myself sucked into wanting things which I can't really justify...such as a second motorbike when I already have a BMW which is wonderful to ride on long journeys with smooth roads when there are no strong side-winds, but tricky for doing the weekly shopping where I live in the Scottish Borders.

'Instead of looking at one or two pictures and reading a technical specification, last night I found myself watching a glossy promotional Mediterranean video, and then another! I'm becoming like Jacques in Pilgrim, drooling over the thought of buying an Italian motorbike which is clearly not a serious proposition on a wet and muddy Scottish farm.

'With internet access at home, old familiar problems begin to reassert themselves, such as checking for emails far too often all through the day, looking at the weather-forecast before making every decision instead of simply stepping outside to feel the air and look at the sky as I had done all of my life.'

'One day this week was largely wasted, producing nothing whatever of value to me or anyone else. It left me feeling empty and aimless when in fact I have a huge amount of rewarding work to be getting on with, writing Vultures and some music, and so little time to get everything done before heading off on the next fantastic journey.'

'We tend to blame ourselves, but our short attention-span is a direct product of certain specific components of the society in which we live.

'Walking slowly through the mountains for three weeks proved that at sixty-seven, I am essentially the same person I was at nineteen, but that I need to put the technology aside and live simply from one day to the next, with none of this insane sense of pressure and anxiety which is ruining our lives.'

'A wonderful new friend in Spain, a few years younger than me, had to keep reminding me that "We have time!" He trusted me to remember all of the meals and drinks, and at the end of my stay he simply added it up on a scrap of paper, there on the bar after breakfast.  He told me where to walk next and I followed his advice without even looking at a map or weather-forecast, which proved very wise indeed.

'That walk became the most spectacular walk of a lifetime, seeing things I haven't even seen on film, and giving me some priceless images for Feeding the vultures.

'Pedro proved to me that outside of the box is the only way I like to think!'

'My father was an artist: watching him paint was an education in itself.

'For at least fifty years I have written the same way I used to paint in my twenties: very quick, unplanned and spontaneous to begin with, then careful, painstaking editing until everything feels right together.'

'The key to my style is that the whole of the text should be effortless to read aloud in your head, like hearing a familiar piece of music.  If I find something in the text which trips me up when I read a page out loud, I work at it for however many hours are needed until the path to the top of the next page is smooth and natural.  A novel needs to be a journey, but not an obstacle-course!'

'I thread the pages with images and themes which gently hold the whole thing together, so that each book stands alone as its own hidden network, looping and linking like the London Underground.

'Each new book also links very closely with what has gone before.  You gradually unravel some of the secrets of Jacques' life: something touched on in book one can be finally explained in book three.'

In the tasty feast of the Tunesmith Trilogy, the chilli-seasoning is a light scattering of puzzles and apparent contradictions which demand a second reading.

The trilogy isn't obviously a detective-series, but it does draw on influences such as Wilkie Collins' Moonstone, Woman in White and Armadale. The Conan Doyle story 'A Study in Scarlet' is candidly referenced in Pilgrim, and there is a feeling that the 'editor known as Percy Stewart' is a bit of a Watson to Jacques' Sherlock Holmes.

'Our quiet, kindly Latin teacher had a mysterious brother with Oxford connections. Little did we know that this man would become one of the most successful writers of detective stories, and it was only much later that I noticed the same surname, then made the discovery.'

'Believe it or not, I had once walked into a police station enquiring about careers as a detective...the stupid things a young man can do when he is trying to find his place in this world!  I told the officer on duty that I had a specialist knowledge of human bones, which might be of use in murder enquiries...this was years before the Internet, DNA evidence and online application forms! I can remember the look of disbelief on the face of the policeman at the desk, and the stifled laughter of his sergeant.

'In fact I really did have that specialist knowledge, being probably the first person in the world to discover something very important about how our bones work...so yes, I could have looked at a tiny fragment of an incinerated skeleton and told you something useful about its original owner. In other respects I would never have been a good police detective, but it was a lot of fun to satirise the discovery in Pilgrim.'

Tunesmith, tinsmith is a big book, with a lot in it. Pilgrim has even more tasty ingredients, some of them challenging, yet it is no trouble at all to read each book in a single sitting, with pauses for food and a good night's sleep. 

'In a wet winter's weekend you can read the two first two books back-to-back, reminding you of last summer's sunshine and moving your mind forward to your own spring walks in the woods.'

'Studying and teaching literature gave me a useful objectivity early in my adult life, so that I can detach myself as an editor and reread the text as many times as necessary.

'The whole point of fiction is surely the images and emotions which it conjures from the reader's own imagination and memory?  Studying Social Anthropology at Cambridge was a real eye-opener, teaching us to view things from other people's perspectives.

'I feel no need to load a chapter with pages of description, or to signpost dramatic highs and lows, when a few words are all that is required to conjure an image or emotion from the reader's own memory.'

'Of course, for this old-fashioned system to work as well as it has done for over two hundred years, the reader does have to bring along his or her own life-experiences...or at the very least, a solid foundation in classic fiction and a useful attention-span. The ravine-jump from a computer-game or celebrity magazine to a five hundred page novel might be a little too wide.

'There are no commercial breaks in these books, but they go down very nicely with a pot of tea or a glass of wine.'

Percy Stewart is well-aware of big changes in writing-style through the last two generations of writers, but stubbornly sticks to his guns.

'Yes, obviously I can see the potential for novelty and variety in writing a novel like an American film-script, with fragmented dialogue, unidentified narrators and frequent flash-backs, but it isn't appropriate for Jacques' stories, which are deeply-rooted in a pre-television era, closer to Victorian novels and classic films than to twenty-first century magazines.

'In Tunesmith and Pilgrim it becomes clear that Jacques was trained as a classical musician, so it is natural for him to think in terms of the whole composition rather than in grabbed sound-bites and text-messages. If I were to use popular twenty-first century novelistic techniques, Jacques' character and life-experiences would feel completely out of place. He lives in his own world, which happens to also be one familiar to most people who can remember living through the last quarter of the twentieth century.

'The books are all about the priceless value of memory, and the richness of real, personal experience...a healthy contrast to living vicariously as we tend to do for hours every day now that our mobile phones tell us what should be doing, and what we ought to find interesting in the outside world.'

'The goal is for Tunesmith, tinsmith, together with Pilgrim and Feeding the vultures, to become a thought-provoking gift for people who like to get their nose stuck into a trilogy. Feeding the vultures is full of sunshine and heart-warming surprises, just what we need in these days of economic, ecological and political gloom!'

'I see no point in writing about social media, or the marital misdemeanours of politicians and television celebrities.  My stories come from another world, the world of direct face-to-face contact between fellow human beings, people we would pass on the street without recognising them.  

'Researching Feeding the vultures in Lourdes and remote villages in the Pyrenees, I found this world alive and healthy, full of real emotions rather than emojis.'

'A close friend has a family home on the side of a mountain in Corsica, in a village with no roads to the houses.  People there live a simple life and when tap-water is scarce, she does her washing-up in a stream coming down from the mountain.

'I can relate to real-life stories like my friend's because when I was a toddler, living in a two-room cottage in the Fens, we had a chemical toilet in a shed and a water-tap across the yard.  I am lucky enough to have lived in some very beautiful, privileged places, and in others which were cold, damp and unhealthy.  I am so glad that my life hasn't all been surrounded by central heating and triple-glazed windows.'

'Over fifty years ago, my father told me about cleaning a frying-pan with sand, as he had to during his National Service in the Sinai Desert.  Real stories such as these don't need any heightened drama or special effects!  I love cleaning a frying-pan with sand...very eco-friendly, because all of the invertebrates and microorganisms cheerfully munch up the remains of my bacon and eggs, leaving no damaging pollution at all.'

'The main narrator in the first two Tunesmith books is Jacques, a once-famous violinist.  You could say that Jacques is the person I might have become, had my family stayed in our home-town in the sixties.  Unlike me, Jacques is an orphan, in search of his roots.  He is a bag of contradictions, sometimes annoying and sometimes endearing.

'Jacques goes through a succession of life-changing experiences, and by the end of Feeding the vultures, everything in his life will have come together at last. 

'All along, he is learning about other people, and about Man's place in Nature.'

'One of the aspects of his character which I decided on right at the beginning was that he should very definitely be looking outwards, not inwards.  I ruthlessly edited out any unnecessary use of the 'I' word in Tunesmith, and in Pilgrim I worked at a very fine balance with Jacques' primary concern, 'you', the love of his life.'

'George Harrison wrote a great satirical song, 'I me me mine', which has been a huge influence on these books.  The Beatles gave me the confidence to write provocative things, because I know how their music and lyrics set us all thinking in the sixties!

'In this self-obsessed century we have plenty enough dreary navel-gazing, all through the music world, the art-world, in 'best-selling novels' and everywhere in the media, so my single-minded purpose was to create a character who is sincerely and deeply interested in other people, just as came naturally to me from the earliest age.

'Finding the character of Maggie Stiggle in book two was an unexpected delight.  She makes me laugh as I write her letters to Jacques!  She, too, absolutely loves other people, and one wonders if she might perhaps be a little in love with Jacques.

'I first fell in love at the age of two, and I still have vague memories of a little girl with dark hair.  I've always found other people absolutely fascinating!'

'Even after months of editing Pilgrim, with a few additions and countless tiny adjustments, on each re-read I was finding something new, some detail I had forgotten, some possible new interpretation of a phrase or word, some new insight.

'In the nineties, writing was an essential part of my work as a photographer.  I used to write a couple of magazine columns, which sometimes led to months of research.  I learned a lot by looking back at those articles, what to write and what to leave out!'

'Now that I am writing full-time again, I can bring together all of the threads of this lifelong love of people, places, wildlife, art and music.  They give me the recurring themes of these books.

Listening has also shaped his life and his writing.

'In the early sixties my great-grandmother talked to me of Queen Victoria and Zeppelin airships.

'I love listening to anyone who wants to tell me about their own lives and journeys, and some of these people become characters in Jacques' stories.'

'My first 'professional' job was playing some well-known Beethoven piano pieces to a kind old man in 1968.  I played violin in two youth orchestras and later on, sang Mozart in a cathedral and Rodgers and Hammerstein on stage.

'Entertaining was in the blood, with generations of performing musicians and a successful West End comedian.'

'Before we moved to the city, I was surrounded by friends and relatives, then in the new school I felt like an outsider looking in at the goldfish, who couldn't wait to get back to his own bowl.  This generated my unusual perspective on other people, and my deep attachment to favourite places.

'I seem to be able to develop a lasting bond with a town, village or mountain within a couple of hours.  I put down roots very easily, and this thwarted love is the power which drives the writing.  I've moved home forty times or more, and the general idea is to raise this to fifty before choosing somewhere to settle at last.'

'Tourism and holidays on the beach are not my ticket.  I love to live somewhere, to get involved by working there and putting down roots with friends, even if I only see them for a few weeks once every half-century.

'Work and friendships led me to learning four languages, which helps.  From that I found that I could read a large book written in a fifth, Catalan. In France in 1980 I was already interpreting between French and German people, or English and Spanish, albeit in a very limited way, and this gave me an unusual perspective on Britain.

'In the city I learned how to laugh at my own folly.  In the books, this gives me the freedom to make jokes at Jacques' expense, to provide comedy which relieves and heightens the tragedy in proper Shakespearian manner, with no need to hurt friends who might recognise themselves in other characters.'

'Researching Feeding the vultures took me back to places which I knew extremely well in the seventies, and I even planned to start the same job all over again, in the same place, forty eight years to the day.  In fact the coach from London was delayed and we arrived in Lourdes at four in the morning, so I had to start work on 2nd April instead.  

'From then on, much that happened was fresh and new, so any autobiographical flavour soon vanished in a wealth of new 'Jacques' experiences.  Getting into rôle and seeing things through forty-something eyes was fascinating, and soon I was racing up mountainsides almost as Jacques might have done.

'I draw heavily on personal experiences so that the books are true.  But most of my own life has been very far from what is in this trilogy, and there is no need for them to be an autobiography.  Anyway, the best bits of my life are happening right now!'

'A good story needs a special energy to drive the plot.  I don't find any need to fake excitement or drama: real life is the mother of invention.

'For the Tunesmith books, I have hardly had to invent anything beyond the plot itself.  The people and places which are so dear to my heart can all have a new life in these pages, for future generations to enjoy and hopefully to open up young minds to the wonders which await discovery close to home, with no need to fly to the other side of the globe.

'Seeing the world through Jacques' rather innocent, idealistic eyes makes me feel young, and people who read the books find them a breath of fresh air.'

The terrible tragedies in Tunesmith and Pilgrim help us to see how precious and miraculous life is.  Again and again, at many bends in their pathways, sometimes by revealing the tiniest naturalistic details, the books are extremely uplifting.

'When I first started to edit Tunesmith, I was astonished by how alive the book is.  I had imagined that editing these books would be a chore, but in fact it is a delight.

'Tunesmith has a magical energy of its own, and reading the finished book fresh from the printers felt like reading something written by a favourite author...like reading John Steinbeck, Thomas Hardy and Laurie Lee in my teens.

'Recently I realised that Gerald Durrell and other natural historians were also unconscious influences...the similarities with Durrell are obvious now, especially in the sense of humour conveyed in little details.

'After weeks of camping in wild places in the Spanish Pyrenees I once spent a night in a smart hotel right by the shore of a beautiful bay where a world-famous artist had lived until a few years earlier. Walking barefoot into the bathroom, there on the polished tiles I found a nice shiny black scorpion. His tail waved a greeting to my foot. It is hard not to have a sense of humour in situations like that!'

'The next morning before breakfast I took some close-up pictures of him and then showed him to some German children who were ready to move into the room.  We agreed to let him go in the bushes...all the time I was thinking of Gerry with his matchbox full of scorpions on the dinner-table in My Family and Other Animals.

'As an artist creating something new, it is natural to unconsciously, unintentionally tap into the flow of ideas and emotions which other artists have experienced before us...the ebb and flow of life on this planet.'

'Years ago, writing technical columns for photographic magazines, I found a real sense of purpose in the work, and the value of careful research so that each finished article would be genuinely useful to lots of other people, rather than mere padding or decoration.

'Now in writing the novels, my job seems to be to act as some kind of channel, using skills which have taken over fifty years to mature like a vintage wine, so that my words and pages allow the reader to enjoy the stories, the characters and the details as if they are seeing everything through their own eyes.

'When someone writes to tell me that something in Tunesmith or Pilgrim reminded them of somewhere they used to know well, I know that the work has succeeded.

'That is precisely what I worked so hard to achieve in twenty years of professional photography and in decades of making music...the art which conceals art, hopefully revealing the truest picture.'