IF Raymond Chandler is the king of hard-boiled detective fiction, Mark Timlin has to be at least a prince, his laconic, wise-cracking characters cast in the Chandler mould, but inhabiting the mean streets of South London.

Some will remember Timlin for his 1995 television spin-off series featuring his ducking and diving, cheeky chappie with the hard edged character, Nick Sharman.

Most recently the fictional detective has been ranging over the southern part of the metropolis in Reap the Whirlwind, a masterpiece of Timlin’s canon.

Now in his seventies but with his imaginative qualities undimmed Timlin, who has also written under the names of Jim Ballantyne, Martin Milk, Tony Williams and Lee Martin has come to rest in Newport, not a million miles from the Ridgeway pub which he sometimes frequents.

Timlin looks the part - quite big and with a shaggy beard, bohemian in his choice of clothes, and with a look that says he may not, during his lifetime, have been wholly unacquainted with the inside of a pint glass.

He could be a character from one of his own books and it is surprising therefore to learn that he was born in genteel Cheltenham.

“I know. With an accent like mine it doesn’t fit, but mum was in the Wrens (Women’s Royal Naval Service) when I was born 75 years ago at a Cheltenham hospital taken over by the Navy. My father had been in the Navy too, but he was killed in a road accident.

“My mother actually came from Kilburn in north London, but after the war there was a scandal which I don’t want to go into, and we moved across to Brixton and then to east London, to the Isle of Dogs.”

The high-flown literary life it most definitely was not. The streets were to be Mark Timlin’s university and observed experience his tutor.

“I had hundreds of jobs literally hundreds, all of them dead-end. I was a mini-cab driver which is just about the roughest job you can have in that part of the world. At that time the mini-cab wars were on in London and you could find yourself having a petrol-bomb thrown through your window," he said.

"A lot of the time I was on the dole. I had no skills but I had read a lot of crime novels and I began to think to myself ‘you can do better than that’. All the things that had happened to me I stored away as research, and I did do better.”

Timlin may have learned his trade from his experiences on the street but he did have a secure underpinning.

Here and there in his devil-may-care life, nuggets of respectability shine through. Unlike your typical geezer living off his wits he went to a grammar school and earned ‘O’ levels in English language and literature and history. Chandler, of course, was always the role model.

“Although his stories are American he went to school at Dulwich College. I used to walk the same streets as he walked, taking in his mood and atmosphere," said Mr Timlin.

“Most of the time at school though, I spent staring out of the window and in my spare time reading lots of comics. By the time I came to read Chandler I was ready to go.

"One of my big regrets is that at 40 years of age, I didn’t do it sooner. The first book was A Good Year for the Roses. I did a television show after that which was considered a bit too violent and was a flop. I cashed the cheque, though.

“I earned a bob or two in the '90s but later on I got to know a lot of bad people, at which time I was close to homeless. I drank in pubs with some seriously dangerous people.

"One publican was a money-lender who could do pretty terrible things to people who were late at paying him back, but people like him told me stories which I wrote down and which later appeared in a book, although with the names changed to protect the guilty.”

The literary term for heroes like Nick Sharman is picaresque - naughty, but charming in a wayward or dangerous sort of way.

Ever since W H Davies in the early and middle years of the last century and Leslie Thomas who opened his account with The Virgin Soldiers, Newport has been doing quite well for this sort of character.

Would Mr Timlin ever consider a Newport-based story? It is not as if we haven’t a few rather iffy characters ourselves.

“I don’t know” he says.

Poor health has limited his ability to research novels as per south London, but then comes a gleam in his eye. The hard-boiled literary lights are still on, even at 75.

“I don’t know. But I might.”

Reap the Whirlwind is published by the Crime and Mystery Club - www.crimeandmysteryclub.co.uk - at £19.99.