Welcome to the Shelter Sleuths Investigations page. Here you can find more background about the book’s characters, the sources of the stories, and the London locations featured in the novels.

If you have found any mistakes, inconsistencies or have any theories, pop them in the comments box below, I won’t hold it against you.

Colin Chaucer

A London cabbie for decades: middle-aged, slim, tall, with dishevelled greying hair. Of all the characters created, I’m proud of this one with his obsession with data and statistics in his pursuit of knowledge. A compulsive diarist who lives on his own. He is loosely based on a famous London blogger, and if truth be told, he’s a little bit like me.

Frank Belzoni

The cabbie of Italian extraction is a composite of the proprietor whom I rented a cab from in my early days. Mediterranean good looks, which are slightly fading, gregarious, knowledgeable and an all-round nice guy. I was apprenticed in Little Italy, so the experience of six years with Clerkenwell’s residents has probably percolated into the manuscript.

Donna Constable

Detective constable/sergeant, lives with her parents in a house overlooking Ealing Common. I’ve made an error here for unless her father was a corrupt senior police officer (he’s not portrayed as such), they couldn’t afford to live in the multi-million pound house. She has the classic beauty of young women of Indian descent – fairly short stature, flawless olive complexion, and long straight raven-black shiny hair.

Tom Farquharson

As a young journalist, I’ve struggled with this character. Not knowing any newspaper hacks and being over half a century older than him. I visualised a tallish, slim guy, wearing a jacket, but no tie, with shortish hair and with a naive countenance disguising a forensic brain.

Nigel

I’ve deliberately refrained from giving the lecturer a surname as his students would never refer to him as such. Wearing clothing firmly stuck in the 80s with printed t-shirts, Levi 501s and sporting a thinning ponytail, he epitomises so many of his academic generation.  His Jack Russell cross terrier, Spencer, is named predictably after Herbert Spencer, the Victorian philosopher and polymath, who originated the expression ‘survival of the fittest, ‘ which rather sums up much of the arc of my novels.

The Green Shelter

The ‘meeting place’, aka ‘incident room’, is based on a green shelter, close to Acacia Road in St. John’s Wood, where in February 1875 the first shelter was opened. Near Lord’s Cricket Ground in Wellington Place, it is nicknamed ‘The Chapel’ or ‘Nursery End’, and recently, a new proprietor has taken over the Shelter. Incidentally, The Chapel was the finishing line for ten cabbies calling themselves The Green Hut Run Club, who on Wednesday, 24th September, 2025, raising money for the charity maintaining the shelters, ran 16 miles across the capital, visiting all 13 of the city’s historic green taxi shelters in one go. The description of the internal layout is accurately described in the Shelter Sleuths Investigations, as is the adjacent toilet and small park. Herbert Spencer, the proprietor’s dog is fiction, as the shelter’s kitchen is adjacent to the dining area, less than 10ft away, strictly speaking, having a dog in the vicinity would contravene the Food Hygiene Regulations 2013, that rules that restaurant owners mustn’t allow dogs into places where food is prepared, handled or stored.

Taxi meters

Currently, no plans exist to incorporate cameras into taxi meters (if there were, On The Meter would be a work of non-fiction). Although many cabs today have CCTV installed in the vehicle’s interior, the cabbie has no access to the images.

Canal Walk Apartments

A new fictional development near Paddington Station. The adjacent canal exists; in the 1800s, Paddington became the gateway to London, connecting the city to the growing industrial world beyond. When the waterways opened in 1801, Paddington stood at the junction of two major canals – the Grand Union Canal and the Regent’s Canal – which terminated at the Paddington Basin. There is a huge number of apartments being built here, the flat visited by Tom and Colin, the sales office and Peter the salesman are all fictional.

Pinner Park Farm (derelict)

The isolated 18th century building of Pinner Park Farm certainly exists, and is situated in the middle of a large area of farmland, once the exclusive hunting preserve from the time of the Norman Conquest of the Archbishops of Canterbury.