It’s a manic time for new writer Mike

Jun 25 2008 by Andrew Baldwin, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Bobby-turned-writer Mike Pannett, who has some close links with Holmfirth, has been compared to James Herriot and Gervase Phinn. He spoke to ANDREW BALDWIN as he prepares to re-visit this area

ON the other end of the phone during a break in a book signing at Pickering writer Mike Pannett sounds excited.

“It’s manic. It’s going so well. I can’t believe it,” he enthuses.

When he was a policeman he spent 10 years patrolling 600 square miles of North Yorkshire, covering an area from Scarborough to York.

He has written the first in a series of books based on the adventures and escapades he had while working on his patch.

Now Then Lad... has shifted 5,000 copies in just a fortnight and has gone into a second printing.

Word has spread rapidly about the first-time author and he is already being compared to James Herriot and Gervase Phinn.

Mike’s first year in North Yorkshire is told in 17 chapters which interweave his escapades on the beat month by month together with his growing knowledge of a landscape that changes with the seasons.

He’s chasing runaway bullocks, holding up the Last Night of the Proms traffic to escort a lost mole across the road and combing the countryside for the villains who stole the colonel’s stone ornaments.

“I wanted to make the book contemporary and tell the truth about what goes on in the countryside,” says Mike.

“The characters were there and the stories were there.”

Mike comes to Huddersfield on Saturday, July 5 to sign copies of his book at Waterstone’s in the Kingsgate centre from 1pm to 2.30pm.

It’s just a short distance away from Holmfirth, where his late dad, Jeffrey, was born. Mike remembers Holmfirth well from visits as a child.

His father left there when he was 18 and went to work for Vickers at York, a claim to fame being that worked on designing the firing mechanism for the Challenger tank.

Mike, 44, was born and bred in Crayke, near Easingwold, and now lives with his wife and three children in a village near York.

He headed for London and was in the Met for 10 years, dealing with riots on the capital’s streets and drug gangs in Battersea and finding out what it was like to stare down the wrong end of a sawn-off shotgun.

He moved back to North Yorkshire in 1997 and became a rural bobby and the local police force’s first wildlife officer.

His work with animals – including dealing with sheep rustling and badger baiting – features in his book.

Some people may feel he was working in a rural idyll, but Mike says the reality was different.

“I may have been with the riot police and the drugs squads in London, but in a way it was more dangerous in North Yorkshire,’’ he says.

“You were working absolutely on your Jack Jones in isolated areas where back-up was 20 to 30 minutes away at the very least. And that’s if they could find you.

“There were some very unsavoury people out there, especially gangs from Liverpool and poachers. You had to tread carefully.”

Mike found TV fame in the BBC2 series Country Cops in 2005, a documentary focusing on the role of rural police.

Appearing in that prompted him to start writing and he left the force in 2007.

“I was in Country Cops on and off for 10 months and got letters from all sorts of people saying they had enjoyed seeing me on the TV.

“I’d always kept records, so I thought I would begin writing something to let people know what goes on in police work,” Mike explains.

He’s planning at least another five or six books on his police experiences and at the moment is revelling in the whirl of publicity.

“I mean, to be talked of as the James Herriot of the police. That’s really something. I just keep pinching myself.

“It’s gone so well so quickly,” he says.

Now Then Lad...Tales of a Country Bobby, by Mike Pannett, is published in paperback by Constable at £7.99.