When Dr George Philip opted to turn from medic to writer, he joined an illustrious line, including W Somerset Maugham, Michael Crichton, Tess Gerritsen, A J Cronin and, of course, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Philip, a retired Edinburgh-born GP has just had his third novel, Now and Then Dead published under his pen name ‘Philip Grant’.

Like Conan Doyle, Philip is a graduate of Edinburgh Medical School and after working in the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, went to St. James’s Hospital, Leeds where he worked, in pathology, among other specialities. “I probably did about a hundred post-mortems – but never one on a murder victim…as far as I know!”

By the time he had retired from general practice in London in 1997, he had already published a spy thriller, The Counterfeit Man. Set in Germany and the US it tells the story of a top UN official who is not all that he seems… In 2001 Philip’s second novel The Other Mister Holmes, featuring Scotland Yard detective Bartholomew Holmes was published.