My Story
The Early Years
Born is Essex, England but raised mainly in Deal, Kent, a small town on the south coast of England, I joined the Police force as a sixteen-year-old cadet in 1972. I then served in the Kent Police until 1989 the majority of time as a plain clothes detective. It was hard but rewarding work as can be seen from the photo on the left.
On leaving the Police I entered the world of the private investigator, a role which saw me conduct investigations in over forty different different countries. In the role of PI, I worked both for established investigation agencies and for a while as the operator of my own detective agency.
I remained in this role full time until 2001 when I moved to Spain with my wife Jackie and our daughter Grace.
The Ex Pat Years
After moving to Spain I continued to operate as a private investigator although more and more this became a part time operation, being combined with a variety of other roles including working in the golf leisure industry, on-line gaming and for a time I was the only English speaking member of staff on a local Spanish radio station, where I wrote and recorded advertising jingles!
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It was in Spain that I first started writing seriously, penning a regular sports page for a local ex-pat magazine and writing golf related articles for various publications, and combining this with a weekly golf related radio show.
However, like many people I always wanted to write a novel and was prompted by a celebrity friend with writing experience, to contemplate writing a book using my own experiences as the backdrop to a detective story. So, Crossing the Line was conceived and the activities of the main protagonist can be said to be (very) loosely based upon my own experiences.
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At first, I would from time to time sit and write a few chapters of the novel, and this continued for four or five years until a computer crash meant that the transcript was completely lost. This prompted me to concentrate more fully on my writing and I completely re-wrote the novel finally completing it in the summer of 2012. I began working on my second novel almost immediately although it took a further six years to complete, but in 2018 Blood Route was published. The third Charlie Sayer novel was released in 2020, and with it we saw the (temporary?) retirement of our intrepid investigator.
Malta, Gozo then Home
In 2017, after some sixteen years in Spain, a work-related opportunity took me to Malta where I lived for another eighteen months, until the hectic pace of life combined with over development of the island led me to seek a quieter pace of life in Gozo.
Whilst in Gozo my wife and I had many a discussion as to where we would move to next. Would it be back to Spain or even a return to “home” to the UK. We finally plumped for the UK and in October of 2019 we undertook a two-day trek across Gozo, Malta and France with all our worldly goods and our cat, before finally ending up back in good old England. And there we remain.