I've never been to Nottingham – stopped there once on the train coming home to Norfolk from Manchester, but it was dark and we saw precisely nothing of it. Never read a John Harvey till last year – when I read six Resnick novels. Now I feel as though I could find my way around Nottingham with very few problems. This is what John Harvey does best. The detail. Sometimes it's the gore, the violence, the rage. But most of all, he introduces you to the characters and describes where the action takes place in such vivid detail you start to become comfortable, familiar, at home. Resnick is one of the best fictional detectives around, and it's not just my opinion. He has a legion of loyal followers and critics are universal in their acclaim.

Ten novels in all, the Resnick catalogue features all of the nasty, violent crimes that we've become accustomed to with Inspector Lynley, Waking the Dead, Morse, and all the others that seem to be the staple of the modern British TV diet, and, sadly, happen in real life. I'm amazed there isn't a Resnick series, though it seems there were a couple of programmes in the 1990s with Tom Wilkinson. Casting shouldn't be much of a problem, despite the fact that the main character has Polish origins. But for now, all we have are the books, and they are, believe me, fantastically good. Two of the six I've read so far focus on child abduction and murder, but as this is a fairly common occurrence in this sad, troubled world we live in, that isn't a problem for me, and they're probably sequentially, quite far apart in the series.

In LONELY HEARTS, Resnick's first major case, he and his team are called on to investigate a number of linked attacks on women who have used the local Lonely Hearts newspaper column. ROUGH TREATMENT sees an ill-matched pair of burglars, Grice and Grabianski getting involved up their necks in cocaine deals. CUTTING EDGE focuses on the local hospital, where a number of staff have been attacked. Resnick tries to find a link before a murder is committed. OFF MINOR has a none-too-bright slaughterhouse worker discovering the body of a six-year-old girl in a disused warehouse. WASTED YEARS sees Resnick investigating a series of armed robberies that bear an uncanny resemblance to similar crimes he investigated ten years previously. It's during the events of Wasted Years that his marriage begins to crumble.

COLD LIGHT sees the kidnapping of a young Housing officer at a Christmas party, and his young colleague, Lynn Kellogg, unwittingly endangers her own life in tracking down the suspect. It's an event that leaves Kellogg needing psychiatric help. LIVING PROOF centres on a prostitute who solicits her customers, then stabs them, sometimes to death. In EASY MEAT, a small-time crook, Nick Snape, is arrested after a vicious attack on a couple of pensioners. Whilst in custody, he apparently kills himself, but not everyone believes it was suicide. In Easy Meat, Resnick becomes romantically involved with one of Nick's teachers, Hannah Campbell. In STILL WATER, the body of a young woman is found floating in the canal. As Resnick investigates, he finds disturbing parallels between the case and his relationship with Hannah.

LAST RITES has guns, drugs and gang warfare. Resnick struggles to control the city whilst his affaire with Hannah begins to cool and his friendship with Lynn Kellogg starts to take on a new dimension. LAST RITES was the last volume in the series. Harvey says he decided to stop the series there because he no longer lived in Nottingham, and though he still knew the city, he felt that he couldn't bring out the detail in any more Resnick novels. I guess there are a good number of Nottingham citizens who can point to a passage or a reference in Resnick and recognise it, and some of them must wish he was still living there and continuing the life and times of Charlie Resnick, one of the greatest detectives in crime fiction. But in the grand scheme of things, it's not that bad a deal – Harvey has other projects, and when people describe his novels as being far and away the best British police procedurals yet written, they're not exaggerating. This is first-rate, first-class, first amongst equals. Faultless, believable dialogue, peerless characters, matchless plots. Superlatives abound – Harvey has to take the crown for best crime writer of the last twenty years. I'm sure his army of fans will agree.