A legal journalist and broadcaster before turning a sharp eye on crime fiction, Marcel Berlins was born in Marseille in 1941 but spent much of his youth in South Africa before moving to England. He always used to say that his fluency in English was as a result of compulsively reading the works of Agatha Christie and Peter Cheney as a teenager and that he supported Aston Villa because it was the first English football team he could pronounce easily!