As soon as I could read, my father and I bonded over books. Of course, he loved me from the moment I was born, but I get the feeling that he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with me until the day he realised that he had created a fellow book nut. He would come into my room while I was reading and gently deposit a pile of books next to me, and we both knew that we understood each other perfectly.

So, of course, when we spent time together, we went to bookshops. We had happy afternoons in Blackwell’s and Waterstones (and Ottakar’s, remember that?), and on one very special weekend every year we went on a road trip to our ultimate Mecca, Hay-on-Wye.

As a child, Hay was pretty much my vision of heaven on earth – a place where every shop was a second-hand bookshop, where everything smelt slightly like musty pages and where I was allowed to go running through towering, wobbly stacks of paperbacks, frantically filling my arms with all of the books that caught my eye. I have a powerful memory of the moment when my father led me up the stairs of Murder & Mayhem, the crime-specialist bookshop, pointed to the entire wall of Agatha Christie books facing us, and said, ‘Which ones don’t you have? Buy them.’ Hay helped make me a reader, and a writer – and for years one of my biggest life goals has been to go to Hay Festival.

So you can imagine how it felt when I was invited to Hay this year. I genuinely never imagined that my first Festival experience would be as an author, hanging out in the Green Room in weirdly close proximity to Jude Law and Sandi Toksvig, going through doors that said Artists Only and feeling only 80% like a gigantic fraud.

I was lucky enough to do an event with my friend and fellow Mystery Girl Katherine Woodfine, whose book, The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow, is out on the 4th of June, and is absolutely the perfect thing for anyone impatient for First Class Murder. Set in an Edwardian department store, it’s a mix of Mr Selfridge, Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockheart series and Nancy Drew, full of ace young detectives, dastardly villains, clever code cracking and delicious iced buns. I love it, and I think you will too.

Katherine and I talked about the golden age children’s books and crime novels that inspired us, our obsession with the 1900s and 1930s respectively and our love of all things detective. Katherine read from The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow, and I read (for only the second time ever) from First Class Murder. Then I spoke about Gunpowder, Murder & Plot, the fourth Murder Most Unladylike Mystery (currently at 13,000 words on my laptop, and set to be published in spring 2016), and caused great excitement when I told the audience that it would take place at Deepdean School and involve the death of the new Head Girl (not, I promise, the old one – King Henry doesn’t appear in it!).

Below are a further selection of pictures from my weekend, and our event. For me the whole experience genuinely was a dream come true.

If you did come to the event, I hope you enjoyed it! Elizabeth R has sent me a lovely video of her reviewing Murder Most Unladylike, which she read after watching me talk about it. She’s now reading Arsenic for Tea – here’s a picture of her with it, below. Looking at her bookshelves, she has excellent reading taste!