From the first page of Tunesmith, tinsmith there is a sense of unreality which pervades all three novels. The main narrator, Jacques, seems to be living in a different world, far from the everyday pressures of life in the twenty twenties.

For Percy Stewart, one of the joys of writing a novel is the opportunity to play games with the reader's ideas of what is truth and what is fiction. He loves to mock his own fears, leaving the reader to guess what is serious and what is sheer tomfoolery.

A deep well of childhood memories going back to the late fifties gives him more than enough material for the novels.

'Over the last twenty years or so, many friends have commented on the interesting life which I have had, and several of them have said that I should write a book.

'In fact it hasn't all been interesting, but I suppose that in some ways they are quite right and when I did finally sit down to write, it felt both perfectly natural and perfectly-timed.

'The detached, objective perspective of a mature man allows me to play fictional games which would have been impossible even five years ago. I can recall the emotions, and it is so much easier to write now that I am no longer living through them every day.'

'Before the age of ten someone told me that I have no sense of humour, and someone else said that I had no imagination. These adults had clearly never watched me playing with my Batmobile, building race-tracks for grasshoppers or trying to make my own space-rocket from a Squeezie bottle.

'Young children can have great fun inventing their own little world. Certain writers seem to have a lot of fun this way, too!'

Ghosts and ghouls were a terrifying part of Percy Stewart's childhood which lingered into adult life.

'The first time I remember going to our local Hippodrome, before the main film there was a trailer for The Mummy. It scared the life out of me.

'One of my school friends was obsessed with Frankenstein, but even the thought of those bolts in his neck was enough to give me the willies. You must remember that these films were all in black and white, with black blood.'

'This friend actually looked a bit like the monster, so when he did the walk and raised his hands, the girls would run away screaming. When we were eight or nine I accepted an invitation to his birthday party.

'His plastic models of Frankenstein, Dracula, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Incredible Hulk set my imagination spinning like a demented dog. It was winter and he lived on a long, dark lane by the river, so never again!

'In those innocent days most of our parents were happy to let their children walk a mile or two to a friend's house. Apart from the ghosts and monsters, there was nothing which could seriously harm us, and very little traffic on the streets after the shops closed at tea-time. I had learned to swim in the river long before I went to school, so even if I had fallen into the water, it wouldn't have been a big issue.'

'The only real dangers in our local community lay in the privacy of home, from psychological, physical or sexual abuse. I do remember one boy coming to school covered in bruises, and the teacher asking questions. He had problems concentrating on his spellings and sums, and he was always getting into trouble, but perhaps his problems paled into insignificance against those of some of the girls, those who never said anything at all in the classroom, and found their own quiet corner in the playground, somewhere to play with a few old beads or a one-legged Cindy doll.'

'A year or two after The Beatles came to fame, well before Man first landed on the Moon, we had our first television.

'The Daleks in the first series of Doctor Who would send me into hiding behind the sofa. The Cyber-men were even more terrifying.

'This didn't stop me from making my very own Dalek, from two cardboard boxes. One was a fridge box and big enough to get inside. I managed to cadge a sink-plunger from my grandmother and I think the other weapon was a wooden spoon. Ping-pong balls proved to be too difficult to cut in half with a kitchen-knife, so the knobbly bits were made from egg-trays stuck on with sellotape.

'Somehow it never occurred to me to cover the whole thing with aluminium foil, which would have been so much more realistic, in the spirit of Blue Peter. Valerie Singleton had a lot to answer for, with her sticky-backed plastic.'

'It astonishes me just how many memories are still there after all these years, but in between the excitement of a sixties childhood, there was many a dull moment, so I suppose the good bits stuck in our minds.

'Perhaps memory distorts reality, but I can honestly say that the only times I remember us children getting over-excited and throwing a tantrum was at something like a birthday party, where we had eaten far too much sugar and become over-tired.

'I can only remember one child in our class of over forty who would sometimes get into a tantrum during a lesson, and I think she may have had serious problems at home. The fact that I even remember it happening, that I can visualise our classroom with her there near the window in the mid-sixties, is surely ample evidence that this was an exceptional event?

'Nowadays children have so much screen-generated excitement almost every day of their lives that their real, hands-on memories are swamped by all of the manufactured images and sounds.'

'Fast-forwarding the tapes by ten years...at nineteen in the common-room of a Cambridge college, I never had the guts to sit through a whole episode. The room was always packed for Doctor Who. Everyone kept a straight face, but I could never explain to one of my friends that The Master's spine-chilling voice was enough to give me nightmares for days.

'I still have nightmares about visiting that common room now...I may have had one this morning, a dream of going to collect my mail from the pigeon-hole marked 'S''

'For two years I happened to live in a room on a seventeenth-century spiral staircase which is notoriously haunted, so at night I had to run from the light switch to get my head under the covers.

'One night three of us had an awful supernatural experience in another room which was even older. I fictionalised this experience in Tunesmith, tinsmith, by telling it exactly as it happened...there was no need to invent our terror, or the evasive action which we took.

'In all those years it never occurred to me to buy a bedside lamp...that had to wait until my fifties!'

'The only thing which eventually cured me of these fears was living alone in a succession of very old cottages. The first of these was at the end of a dark lane in the depths of Suffolk. No-one would have heard my screams in the night, but the most ghostly apparition I ever saw was a barn owl which once sat shrieking outside the window on my four hundred year-old chimney.'

The most terrifying experience Percy Stewart ever had was so real that he still questions its origins. He was wild-camping at the foot of a remote dun...a prehistoric fort overlooking the sea, far from any road or human habitation. At nightfall the place conjures images of Macbeth's witches.

'The third time I went there, I must have upset the local residents by pitching the tent directly on top of some prehistoric burials. If I had thought about it with the tiniest bit of intelligence, this would have been obvious, because apart from that little patch of grass, everywhere was either seashore, midge-infested bog or black volcanic rock.

'Sometime after midnight I woke up in a cold, running sweat. If it really was only a nightmare, it was certainly the most real one I have ever experienced.  I didn't just see the skeletons...I could feel their fingers probing my rib-cage!'

'It has taken very little invention to fictionalise some of these experiences in all three novels. Because they were so real to me at the time, I can convey the horror in very few words, leaving the reader's imagination to do the rest.'

'Uncovering the cover of Pilgrim was a lot of fun, too, because it suggests a ghostly face, two serpents and mystical numbers.

'Do these numbers have any significance in the plot? Whose face might it be? Are the serpents linked to the Book of Genesis? Is that really a crucifixion?

These games play into the reader's hands, giving him or her the power to decide what is deadly serious and what is simply there to amuse. The novels are so richly-layered with possible meanings that they demand a second reading, and a third.

'I love to weave in little threads of gold or silver from the past, like some ancient fabric.

'Sometimes I briefly allow the narrative to sit on a modern plastic surface, but within a few pages it is sure to once again dive into more mysterious waters. There are only a few tiny moments of melodrama, because the web of real events, real places and real people contains quite enough material for any writer.'

'Boiled down to their simplest essence, the Tunesmith books are all about memory and imagination, in the good old tradition of some of my favourite nineteenth-century novels, with a nod to the real horrors of the twenty-first century.'