Mike Hollow started writing his Blitz Detective novels after going to watch the 2012 Olympics in Stratford, East London, and seeing the old town hall where in 1940 his father spent his teenage nights watching out for incendiary bombs on the roof.
 
The first Blitz Detective book was published in 2015, since when Mike’s written a new one every year. They all feature Detective Inspector John Jago of the Metropolitan Police and are set in 1940 in the Essex County Borough of West Ham, which suffered some of the heaviest bombing.
 
Mike was born in West Ham and grew up in Romford. He read Russian and French at Magdalene College, Cambridge, then worked for the BBC for 16 years before moving to the international development agency Tearfund for 11 and then going freelance as a journalist, copywriter, editor, translator and now author. His first published work was a limerick in a boys’ comic (age 11, fee five shillings), and his whole working life has been about putting the right words in the right order in one form or another.
 
Mike and his wife Margaret live in Hampshire and visit their children and grandchildren in London on the flimsiest of pretexts.