Shortly after my first novel was published I went on a journey to a place I’d never been before. I’d heard about this place. I even knew people who went there. But I had never been there myself. It was the crime section of my local bookshop.

That’s where they’d shelved my book, you see.

This was my first encounter with a condition that psychologists refer to as ‘Impostor Syndrome.’ It particularly affects high-flyers and successful people. Instead of enjoying their achievements they become consumed by worry and self-doubt. The nagging fear that they did not merit their success; it was all just a fluke.

Authors can be particularly prone to it when they first get published and see their work in a bookshop amongst all those ‘real’ authors. And if your first book gets shelved in a section you know nothing about, well!

Not long after publication, I received a communication from the Sherlock Holmes Society. As you can imagine, this august fraternity is composed of people who are nuts about the crime genre. And knowledgeable too. Not the sort of people easily fooled by an interloper.

This is it, I thought. I’m in trouble now. I’ve been found out. But no. They had voted my creation the best new fictional detective of 2001.

I began receiving invitations to speak at crime writers’ festivals, such as the annual event in Harrogate, Yorkshire. I appeared on the bill alongside authors who were household names in the murky world of crime fiction. I spoke before audiences of addicts. What was worse, they were allowed to ask questions. The first one was almost invariably, ‘Have you always loved crime fiction?’ What could I say? This is what I said: 'Yes, I have always loved crime.' (You see! two months being shelved with the criminal fraternity and already I was beginning to act like one.)

What was happening here? How did I come to be taken to the bosom of these people whom I knew nothing about? OK, I admit, my books do contain a private detective. But really I think the reason I was categorised amongst the crooks was I had stolen my central character.

You probably know him: A loner, a seeker after truth and justice in a fallen world; a modern day knight whose armour is tarnished, but whose heart is pure. He brings justice to birth in a world from which it is cruelly lacking. Sometimes his methods are unsound; they skate along the edge of moral dubiety. He gets in frequent scrapes with the cops and gets hit over the head on a regular basis, usually with a tyre iron, whatever that is.

He is in fact the archetypal wise-cracking gumshoe from the hard-boiled dime thrillers of the 1930s. And I stole the paradigm in part from its acknowledged inventor, Raymond Chandler.

(OK here is one crime writer I have read. But I don’t really consider him one. A writer so brilliant that to ascribe him to a genre would be like locking him in a dungeon on bread and water.)

It was Raymond Chandler’s creation, the gumshoe Philip Marlowe that is largely credited with inventing the icon. I just stole some of Chandler’s essential oil of hard-boiled gumshoe and added my own twist. My hero walks around a Welsh seaside resort called Aberystwyth, in west wales. It’s a place of sand, amusement arcades, donkeys, candy floss and gossiping old Welsh busybodies. It is a million light years away from the mean streets of Los Angeles. These two worlds are polar opposites and the juxtaposition of them gives rise to a bizarre universe.

And this, I believe, is what creativity is all about. ‘Write what you know’ is a piece of advice frequently offered the would-be writer. It strikes me as a very dubious principle. Surely true creativity involves writing what you don’t know. What no one knows. To write what you can imagine or conceive. And thereby bring into being things that have never been seen before. Like Philip Marlowe speaking Welsh.

It involves pottering about in the rag and bone shop of the heart, picking up things, sawing them up and reassembling them. And this necessarily means re-using old stuff, judicious recombining. Because, as is frequently remarked, ‘there ain’t nothing new under the sun’.

There is a long honourable tradition for this. Practically all of Shakespeare’s forty or so plots were lifted from somewhere else. And he clearly didn’t care. T. S. Eliot once said, 'Good artists borrow; great artists steal.' And it seems as long as you steal from the dead you can get away with it.

All the same, you might object, if you are going to steal motifs from a well-established genre like private eye fiction, surely the aficionados, those gate-keepers of the genre, are going to be looking for inaccuracies? Well maybe. But they are on morally dubious ground if they do. None of it bears any relation to the real world anyway, so what is the yardstick by which they would judge? The truth is the whole genre is a mass of stuff that is stolen or stuff that is invented.

It is made up of conventions that we love to read about but which are, like the conventions of fairy tales, largely made up. Do gangsters in real life swap witty repartee before shooting each other? I hardly think so.

Real private eyes spend their lives in cars with steamed up windows secretly filming people committing adultery. That’s what they do. They don’t get to date ditsy blondes. They’re not allowed to beat people up and they never have a scene where they swap wisecracks with a jaded detective in a shabby raincoat. Oh, and they never have a pint of whisky in the glove compartment of the car next to the gun. It’s no fun at all. It’s about as glamorous as…well, as sitting in a car filming people committing adultery. Would you want to spend time with a character like that? Of course not.

Enter the life of a fictional one, however, and your soul will take wing. It may be a twisted bitter immoral grimy world out there, but here walks a guy who is none of those things. He sacrifices himself to bring justice and fairness to birth. He makes everything all right in the end. And he’s witty and good-looking too. And, if that wasn’t enough, as a side-line he restores your faith in humanity.

In fact he is one of the most admirable human beings you could ever hope to meet and about the only place you are likely to find him, is between the pages of a book. Which makes him a bit of an impostor. All the same, I’d say he performs a more useful service than most real private eyes.

Or as no one has yet said, one man’s impostor is another man’s faith-healer.

Malcolm Pryce is the author of three novels featuring the unconventional private detective, Louie Knight.