I love crime writing festival Bloody Scotland, and I’m delighted to say that I’ll be speaking again there this September. Based in Stirling, it was founded in 2012 by the Scottish crime writers Lin Anderson and Alex Gray. I have lots of wonderful memories from festivals over the years but, given recent tragic events at Cambridge University around Jason Arday, also an odd experience that’s worth sharing about the now disgraced true crime author Paul Harrison.

Back in 2013 Harrison and I were both on a panel, chaired by Alex, discussing the infamous Glasgow serial killer Bible John, and our respective books about the case called The Lost British Serial Killer and Harrison’s Dancing with the Devil.

Inevitably, there was some confusion. I had written The Lost British Serial Killer with my friend, a Sky News broadcast journalist also called Paul Harrison, who is not the true crime author who goes by the same name. When Alex first introduced me to my fellow panel member in the green room, Harrison joked he was regularly mistaken for my friend with whom I had not only written The Lost British Serial Killer but also Hunting Evil: Inside the Ipswich Serial Murders.

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Of course, they didn’t look like each other, as the true crime Harrison had a beard, wore spectacles and is quite a bit older than the Paul Harrison who is a broadcast journalist. That encounter was the first and only time we met, although Harrison - the true crime writer - would later acknowledge me in other books he published as if I was an old and dear friend. Even in Dancing with the Devil he “love bombed” me in his text, describing how I was “without doubt one of the most eminent criminologists in the British Isles” and how I displayed “not only an academic mind but the rugged determination of a hardened cop on the hunt for his suspect”. I realise now this was part of his con.

Several things Harrison told me in the green room all those years ago made me suspicious, as did his biography on the book’s dust jacket. There he was described as “a former Police Officer - one of the first in the UK to interact with the FBI on........

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