An obsession with the Mafia may seem an unhealthy addiction, but when you've had a contract on your life issued by the grotesquely misnamed ‘Men of Respect’ and you've lived to tell the tale, then it has a certain nostalgic resonance.

I was working as a globetrotting investigative journalist when I was employed by Time/Life magazine to investigate the Mafia's activities in the Bahamas. Three months later, I escaped from Nassau as a stowaway on a cruise ship heading for Miami to avoid the ‘hit’ which I'd been tipped off about. Thereafter, I was moved around the US to a network of ‘safe’ houses where for several years I lived and wrote under an assumed name.

Standing for Parliament and being pelted with rotten tomatoes and eggs on the hustings isn't the most obvious way to keep a low profile, but politics has always been one of my major interests – after crime. Although I lost - heavily - it led to my becoming a hired gun - as a speechwriter for ministers, and finally acquiring a seat in the House of Commons (via the trademen's entrance) as a Lobby Correspondent and Political Editor.

The duo of crime novels I'm currently working on, The Hunter - to be followed by The Hostage - have a Mafia plot. Obsessions die hard!

• Crash Course hardback and paper. Described by The Times as the best account ever written of the build-up to Lockerbie and the sabotage of Pan Am flight 103. TV documentary.
  
  
• God's Cop - Hutchinson and NEL (1988)
  The biography of Sir James Anderton, controversial Chief Constable of Greater Manchester, and the John Stalker shoot-to-kill scandal of Northern Ireland. TV documentary. Serialised for three weeks in News of the World.
  
  
• Murderous Places - Cassell (1989)
  
  
• My Rum Life - Viking (1979)
  Story of Red Rum, the racehorse that won a record three Grand Nationals. Serialised three weeks in News of the World. Made into TV movie.

Fiction:

• Bullet for an Encore - Hale (2005)
• Last Bus to the Grave - Hale (2005)

Non-Fiction (Written as Michael Prince) :

• Crash Course - Harper \ Collins (1990)
• Deadline - Hale (April 2006)