Lance Bradley, idling his life away in the little Somerset town of Glastonbury, suddenly receives a call for help from the eccentric sister of his old friend Rupert Alder. Rupe appears to have vanished without trace. Reluctantly, Lance goes to London, to discover that Rupe’s employers want him tried for fraud. A Japanese businessman claims he has stolen a document of huge importance. And a private detective is demanding money for trying to trace, on Rupe’s behalf, an American called Townley, who was involved in a mysterious death at Wilderness Farm, near Glastonbury, back in 1963.

No sooner has Lance decided that whatever Rupe was up to is too risky to get involved in than he finds that he already is involved, and the only way out is to get in deeper still. Where is Rupe? What is the document he has stolen? Who is Townley? And what happened at Wilderness Farm nearly thirty years before that holds the key to a secret more amazing than Lance Bradley could ever have imagined?

It used to be a recollection every adult shared. Now it’s a badge of middle age (or worse). Yes, I can remember where I was when President Kennedy was shot.

The answer, for the record, is that when the news came through on Friday 22nd November 1963, I was at home with my brothers watching television, though not for long, since all programmes were interrupted and then suspended (with Harry Worth forever stuck halfway through a loft-hatch). Our parents were at the local cinema, watching a John Wayne western. (My father’s fondness for westerns explains why the first novels I read were by Zane Grey.) They weren’t there for long either, since the film was stopped, the manager broke the dreadful news from the other side of the Atlantic and everyone went home - without even a partial refund, my father complained. He was old enough to remember a previous presidential assassination and reckoned we were all overreacting.

Well, maybe we were, but even as a nine-year-old I sensed something very strange was going on when the man arrested for killing Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself murdered two days later. Little did I know at the time that the first, greatest and most plausible conspiracy theory of them all was being born in front of me. It wasn’t until 1975 that any of us saw the now famous Zapruder film of the assassination, but there were enough – many more than enough – contradictions, inconsistencies, illogicalities and downright impossibilities in the official version of events to convince the open-minded that they weren’t being told anything close to the truth.

When I became a novelist, I knew at some point I’d want to write about the impenetrable mystery of what happened in Dallas on 22nd November 1963. Dying to Tell is the book in which I finally did that, although anyone flicking it open at page one is likely to be puzzled to find themselves in the company of an idle thirty-seven-year-old Englishman living in Glastonbury in the autumn of 2000. Where’s the connection? All will, of course, be revealed. Suffice to say, though, that Lee Harvey Oswald’s three-year spell in the Marines in the late fifties is crucial to the plot. So little is known about his activities while stationed in Japan and the Philippines that a little – well, more than a little – speculation seemed in order.

I’m sorry to say that I was never able to show my father the photographic proof that the assassination of President Kennedy never stops throwing up fascinating oddities: a snapshot of none other than John Wayne visiting a Marine base in the Philippines in January 1958, while filming The Barbarian and the Geisha (not alas a western). Who is that in the doorway behind him? Yes, you guessed.

Coincidence? I think not.