Father Paolo Baldi Mysteries

Simon Brett was born in Worcester Park, Surrey, on 28 October 1945. He was educated at Dulwich College and Wadham College, Oxford, where he read English and was president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society. After graduating in 1967 he worked as Father Christmas in a department store before landinga job at the BBC as a radio producer. During his ten years there, he worked on such programmes as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Week Ending, The Burkiss Way, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and Just a Minute. He moved to London Weekend Television in 1977, where he produced Maggie and Her, End of Part One and The Glums (a popular spin-off from radio’s Take It From Here). Brett’s first Charles Paris novel, Cast In Order of Disappearance, was published in 1975, and by 1979 he was able to leave LWT and become a full-time writer. He has written over eighty books, including nineteen Charles Paris books, fifteen Fethering Mysteries and six Mrs Pargeter novels, as well as several non-series titles such as A Shock to the System (1984), which was adapted as a film starring Michael Caine. He has also contributed to several anthologies and scripted many sitcoms for radio including No Commitments, Smelling of Roses and After Henry. Other radio work includes several one-off plays for Radio 4, and a number of episodes of the detective series Baldi. A former Chair of both the Crime Writers’ Association and The Society of Authors, he is currently President of the Detection Club, as well as being involved with various writers’ organisations. He is married with three children, and lives in West Sussex.

Bill Murphy is a lawyer and former Army Reserve officer.He worked for the Washington Post and reported from Afghanistan in 2007. He wrote In a Time of War about young military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has always been fascinated by entrepreneurship ever since launching and joining three separate start-ups. He lives in Washington, DC.

Dr Andrew Martin is a psychologist and researcher specialising in educational psychology. In 2003, he was listed in The Bulletin's SMART 100 Australians and ranked in the Top 10 in the field of Education. In 2002, the American Psychological Association judged his PhD the world's Most Outstanding Doctorate in Educational Psychology and prior to that the Australian Association for Research in Education judged his PhD the Most Outstanding Education Doctoral Dissertation in Australia. Dr Martin is regularly invited to conduct keynote conference papers, student workshops, teacher professional development, parent nights, and presentations to education departments aimed at enhancing student motivation, engagement, and achievement. His work is also featured on television and radio and in major newspapers and magazines. Dr Martin has conducted extensive research into student motivation, engagement, and achievement as well as work into boys' education, gifted and talented, disengagement, educational resilience, effective teaching, parenting, teacher-student relationships, and Aboriginal education. He has published this research in many of the world's top academic journals and at international conferences. His first book, ‘How to Motivate Your Child For School and Beyond’ (Bantam, 2003) has been enthusiastically received by schools and parents across Australia. Dr Martin is Research Fellow at the Self-concept Enhancement and Learning Facilitation (SELF) Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, and is Director of an educational consultancy (www.ajmartinresearch.com). He lives in Sydney with his wife and children.

John Murphy is an emeritus professor in politics at the University of Melbourne. For almost forty years he has taught generations of students about Australian history, politics and social welfare. He has published widely on Australian political history, including on the Vietnam war, the politics of the 1950s, and Australian welfare policy up to 1949. His biography of the Labor leader Bert Evatt was shortlisted in 2017 for the Prime Minister’s prize for Australian history, and the National Biography Award.

In 2011, Half a Citizen, his book based on interviews with welfare recipients and co-written with Suellen Murray, Jenny Chalmers, Sonia Martin and Greg Marston, won the Australian Human Rights Commission Award for non-fiction. His most recent book, with Andrew Rosser, was about social welfare policies in Southeast Asia.

Writer Francis Turnly's first radio play Pressing the Flesh was short-listed for the Imison Award in 2003. Subsequent work for Radio 4 includes Point of Departure, Homestead and 'Shelter', an episode of the detective series Baldi.