I've always been watching the detectives....

And now Jeremy Vine has created his own crime caper. The veteran broadcaster, writing exclusively for the Daily Express, reveals why the inspirations behind his thrilling new novel include both Agatha Christie and Elvis Costello

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I WOKE to a detective story. Maybe I had left the radio on, in our pebbledashed family home in Cheam, the storm black and loud outside; I must have fallen asleep while Capital Radio jukeboxed tunes at my bedside.

When I woke, it was to a particular line, and I'll never forget it. "She's filing her nails while they're dragging the lake." The voice was nasal, a little like Bob Dylan's. There was a rasping guitar. I was 11. I didn't even know what filing nails was.

There was no rewind on the radio, so the haunting words drifted away like smoke rings from a cigarette as I fell back to sleep. I would have to listen out to hear them again, find out whose voice that was and whose guitar.

It turned out to be my introduction to Elvis Costello. The song, Watching the Detectives, was not only his first real hit - I like to think it was my first murder mystery.

I'm still not sure what's happening in it, except that somehow a murder on the TV is communicating danger to the woman watching the screen with her lover: "She looks so good that he gets down and begs." If Elvis was my King, Agatha became Queen.

Soon after I heard the detective song, my mum said "You might enjoy this" and handed me my first whodunnit. The book was Hercule Poirot's Christmas, published in 1938.

Mum was giving it to me nearly 40 years after publication, and here we are, nearly 50 years on from that mother-son exchange, and I still remember its shocking set-up. An old man with lots of money, Simeon Lee, calls his family together to announce he is revising his will. He seems to be deliberately annoying them, and he goes too far.

Before he gets to change the will, they hear a crashing sound. He has died in a locked room. The only clue is a piece of rubber on the floor. I'll take you no further into the story, in case you are reading it now.