The Dead City is the ninth part of your successful Stefan Gillespie series. Tell us about it and about him

1944. The beginning of the end for Nazi Germany. Garda detective Stefan Gillespie travels to Berlin with instructions for the Irish ambassador and finds himself caught up in the chaos. Stefan thinks he’s decent, but as he searches for an Irishman held prisoner in Germany, he must ask himself if saving a life is worth it in the face of the devastation.

Your book returns to Berlin in 1944, four years later as “The City of Lies” (2017). Tell us about your experiences in the city

I knew the city in the 1980s. The Cold War was hot. Soviet soldiers drove through West Berlin, British and American military police through East Berlin. Western subway trains ran beneath East Berlin through ghost stations that hadn’t been used since the 1950s. The Wall was on every corner. When I recently visited Berlin with my children, it was impossible to describe the unique intensity of this city divided in two. I was there when the Wall fell in 1989. It felt like the final act of World War II.

The series also featured Gdansk, New York, Lisbon, London, Rome and Dublin. Which cities did you enjoy describing the most?

New York in the 1930s – unlike any other city on earth.

You grew up in England with an Irish family. Did their stories about Irish history inspire your love of the subject?

It was only after I finished The City of Strangers that I realised how much of my grandmother was in it. She was born in Inishowen in 1898 and told stories of IRA fighters and the London Blitz. Not all of them were true. There was a priest who took the host to a dying man who came through the machine gun fire unharmed. At five, I had my doubts. But her words influence what I write. Maybe they are the reason I am writing it.

You live in a former farmhouse on the edge of the Wicklow Mountains. It is Stefan’s family home in all your novels. Describe it and its significance

The house no longer looks like the farmhouse of 25 years ago, but is clad in the same stone. Viewed from above, the layout reflects the Ordnance Survey map of the 1840s. It retains its place in the landscape. It looks out over Kilranelagh and the other hills with the hill forts of Baltinglass. Nearby is the wild silence of Kilranelagh Cemetery, perhaps the oldest burial ground still in use in Ireland. The area has a quiet, understated beauty. The past rises from the ground. But we also embrace the present with a cold gaze that stops us losing control of ourselves. I hope a little of that is in my stories.

Your TV credits include Emmerdale, Eastenders, The Doctor and the Little Dog, The Bill, Heartbeat, Between the Lines, Inspector Barnaby and A Touch of Frost. What are you most proud of and has it helped you in writing your novels?

An episode of Touch of Frost about a teenage boy and girl with Down syndrome is still important. I fought to have a young man with Down syndrome, Timmy Lang, cast when ITV were looking for someone to “play” Down syndrome. Timmy played the demanding role triumphantly. I think crime series add little to my novels, but All Creatures Great and Small showed me that the smallest things can make a story.

You lived in Leeds when the Yorkshire Ripper was on a killing spree. Did you start writing crime novels then?

Violence on television, particularly against women, made me uncomfortable. I abandoned a job on the Ripper murders because I wanted to follow the disastrous police investigation and the producer kept wanting to see “the hammer fall”.

When you were seven years old, you contracted polio. Did that help you become a reader and a writer?

I spent months alone in an isolation hospital with nothing to do but read. I can’t remember what I read (apart from Dandy and the Beano). I think that’s what got me into writing.

The head of the BBC Script Unit described your radio play about a theologian with links to the Nazis as the most offensive he had ever read. Why?

It was about a Nazi euthanasia program for the disabled. It contrasted nuns trying to save children with a theological debate about whether the Church should intervene. The facts were well documented, the piece well researched. Oddly enough, it was sent to the Catholic Information Office. They said it was a lie. And that’s why I had to be scolded! No one noticed a story about the self-sacrifice of Catholic nuns.

You moved to Ireland when your first wife Joy left to produce Ballykissangel. What made you stay despite her death?

I had no reason to stay. I assumed I would return to England. But Wicklow became my home. I don’t believe in fate, but our choices are happy coincidences. When I was studying Old Irish at Oxford, I read Fingál Rónáin. Idris Foster, my tutor, knew the hills where the story is set and the “white stones” that the poet compares to cattle. For 40 years I forgot that conversation until I stumbled upon these stones, also forgotten (but now a national monument). If I don’t know why I stayed, then maybe I needed to know.

What projects are you working on?

The next Stefan Gillespie.

Have you ever been on a literary pilgrimage?

My grandfather’s trips in Dorset took me as a child through Hardy’s Wessex, but later I visited Boscastle, where he met his first wife and, after her death, found inspiration for his great elegy to lost love, Poems of 1912-13.

What is the best writing tip you have ever heard?

Stephen King: If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have time (or the means) to write.

Who do you admire the most?

Socrates.

The most remarkable place you have visited?

The rock paintings in the Tsodilo Hills of the Kalahari. In the evening, around the campfire, I watched a San storyteller captivate his audience. We drank beer and talked about storytelling. As I left, he gave me his hunting bow. He said it would help me hunt stories.

Your most valuable possession?

A very tattered New Testament by William Tyndale from 1538, the first English translation from Greek. Tyndale created English prose almost single-handedly. 80 percent of the King James Bible is his work. He was strangled as a heretic and burned at the stake. It is also my most beautiful book, just because of its words.

Which living or dead writers would you invite to your dream dinner party?

Catullus, Chaucer, John Donne, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett.

The best and the worst about where you live?

The best thing is the view. The worst thing is the weather.

What is your favorite quote?

Cicero: If you have a garden and books, you have everything you need.

Who is your favorite fictional character?

Huckleberry Finn.

A book that makes me laugh?

Richmal Crompton’s William stories. I laughed as a child and again when my own children discovered them.

A book that could move me to tears?

Josef Bór’s Terezin Requiem tells of a performance of Verdi’s Requiem in the Prague concentration camp of Theresienstadt/Terezin – 33,000 people died there; 88,000 were sent to death camps. But conditions were “better” than elsewhere. The Nazis even decorated the camp to convince the Red Cross that it was a “city” that Hitler had “given” to the Jews. Much music was produced in Theresienstadt, which had musicians of exceptional caliber. The Requiem was performed for the Red Cross. The SS applauded the conductor Raphael Schächter. He asked for his choir to be kept together. Days later they entered a gas chamber in Auschwitz. Together.

“The Dead City” by Michael Russell is published by Constable