My first book, Every Breath You Take, is the story of an art lecturer who lived and died in terror of a stalker. The experience of stalking isn’t something I researched, it is something I lived. I taught university; out of the blue, a student decided he loved me, and threatened to do away with my husband and children. He made our lives hell for eighteen tense and terrifying months. Being a target of violence is an effective way for a mystery writer to get inside her subject, but it’s not a research method I would recommend.

Since then, working on five further novels, the process of research has been mostly a pleasure. Research has provided an excuse for exploring more intimately places that I find fascinating: London; the Norfolk coast; Cambridge, where my series novels are based; Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs, which provided the setting for the novel that will come out in 2003.

Research has given me an entrée into worlds that I wouldn’t otherwise know. It has taken me into a high-security institution where I could consider the circumstances of children, some as young as eleven years of age, who had committed murder. It’s taken me into an Arab embassy, to be entertained by diplomats to a formal tea while, in the same room, the hooves of race horses thundered across the television screen.

In the interests of research, I’ve studied the archival stories of women in 19th-century Cambridge who were jailed for loose morals. I’ve breached security in the tallest skyscraper in Britain, One Canada Square, shocking a guard in the offices of the Daily Telegraph by my unannounced arrival. I’ve posted notices in women’s washrooms inviting prostitutes to contact me for an interview; one of the conversations that followed was a poignant exchange with a teenager who begged me to find her work as a call girl. That’s how I learned that questions about the ethics of research are not the province of scientists alone.

Most recently, I’ve come to grips with the complexity of missing-persons investigations. This involved me in the work of forensic artists: in the process of retouching photos of corpses so that the dead look more recognisably life-like; in the process of rebuilding a face from a skull without nose, without ears, without flesh. In the Midnight Hour concerns what happens to the Cable family when they have to cope with the unexplained disappearance of their four-year-old son, and I observed the creation of images that look like up-to-date photographs of children who have in fact vanished many years before.

The central character in my series novels is a cool and likeable private investigator, so I am spared the need to master all the intricacies of police work. But even so, I get a lot of help from a high-ranking police officer who was at one time my postgraduate student. Chris keeps me on the straight and narrow. She provides information on serious matters that interest me — like airport security and the condition of corpses and the distribution of drugs — and on more frivolous matters too. After I’d sent her the manuscript of Standing in the Shadows, I got a fax from headquarters with a stern reprimand: “Female police officers do not, I repeat not, wear regulation underclothes.” The offending passage was deleted straight away.

I love doing research, but I also have to struggle with it, and I suspect most writers could make a similar admission. Research is notoriously greedy. It longs to take over and to displace your writing self. The worst scenario? Notebooks full of research overflowing your study, and the story scarcely begun. Or, as you write, great unappetising dollops of research, tossed into the manuscript like the lumps in badly-mashed potatoes.

The way around this, I’ve learned, is to keep your research under strict control. Assume the dominatrix position. Let it know who is boss. Keep firmly in mind that the essential place of research in a mystery is to save readers from being jarred out of the flow of the story by a discordant fact; nothing more.

Let’s face it. Although there are mystery writers who have built their reputation on forensic detail, mystery fiction can flourish perfectly well without it. To write convincingly and powerfully about the fact of crime and its causes and its consequences, you don’t need to be an expert in the decomposition of corpses or the psychology of serial killers. To write powerfully and convincingly about crime, you need to be a writer with a feel for plot and narrative. You need characters that are poised to leap off the page. You need a story to tell, and the capacity to carry readers with you to the end.

And when you’ve succeeded in making your story as gripping as you can, when you’ve finished the manuscript and waved it good-bye, then you’re free. You can climb your mountain or rendezvous with drug barons and call it research, if you like. Anything to keep you off the streets while, in your imagination, the next mystery takes shape.

In 2002, Michelle Spring won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel, for In the Midnight Hour.