By their very nature writers spend a lot of time alone, wrestling with prose in locked studies and attics.

So Simon Brett, patron of new literature festival Worthing World Of Words, admits he jumps at the chance to go to a conference or a festival.

“It’s hard work and not very sociable being a writer,” he says from the home near Arundel he moved to in 1981.

“To get a writer out of his house doing something which feels vaguely like work is always a bonus. It’s why writers like festivals – they meet other writers, their public and people. Time away from the keyboard chatting has a great appeal.”

Having begun his career as a radio producer for the BBC, Brett took the plunge as a professional writer five years after the publication of his 1975 crime novel Cast, In Order Of Disappearance.

“It was the fourth or fifth I had written but the first which was publishable,” he admits.

“I had always wanted to be a writer but never thought it was a realistic ambition.

“I spent most of the next five years poring over sheets of paper with sums on them working out whether I could match my BBC salary by writing. ‘Brave’ was a word a lot of my friends used at the time.”

Working in the BBC’s Light Entertainment department Brett produced Late Night Extra, Week Ending, The News Huddlines, The Burkiss Way, Just A Minute, I’m Sorry, I Haven’t A Clue and detective series Lord Peter Wimsey which he admits first got him thinking about the crime genre.

He is particularly proud of one of his last jobs.

“I’m the only person in the known universe who got a script on time from Douglas Adams,” he says.

Brett produced the pilot episode of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy before moving on to work at London Weekend Television.

He puts Adams’s legendarily snail-like speed of working down to his hatred of being on his own.

“As soon as he thought of a funny line he would phone a friend for a coffee to tell him the line.”

In contrast, with more than 90 novels to his name, Brett doesn’t suffer from that same crippling writer’s block.

“I’m lucky in that I can work quickly when I have got a good idea,” he says. “It’s partly that and the knowledge I have got to make a living.”

It’s not always easy though.

“I finished my last book about a month ago,” he says. “I wrote in my diary one day that I’d spent the afternoon looking at the words Chapter 23, so I can still grind to a halt.”

Brett’s latest book, The Cinderella Killer, was published last week and is his 92nd since 1975.

It’s the 19th book to feature the character who started it all – the moderately successful actor turned amateur detective Charles Paris.

Brett returned to the character last year following a 16 year break.

In between 1998’s Dead Room Farce and 2013’s A Decent Interval the character had been portrayed on the radio by Bill Nighy, but Brett admits he wasn’t influenced by adapter Jeremy Front’s new reading of his beloved detective.

Having started out writing about a character 20 years his senior, Brett is now older than Paris.

“I don’t find any difficulty getting into his mindset,” he says. “It’s strange, a lot of characters stay the same age through a series of books, but when I started I aged him a year with each book.

“When I got him to 57 I wasn’t sure there were many parts for actors in their 60s, so I stopped the clock. Someone once worked out that Hercule Poirot would have solved his last case at the age of 136 if he didn’t start until he retired from the Belgian police force!

“Paris has always had an on-off relationship with his wife. It was more about what happened to his children and grand-children where it could get complicated. The way I got around it was to make sure they didn’t appear in the later novels!”

Brett has a parallel career as a playwright, penning short plays for the Arundel Theatre Trail every year for the last decade, and most recently penning a prologue to a West End version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance Of Being Earnest.

“It has got a wonderful cast, who are all about 30 years too old,” says Brett of the production, which is set to appear at the Harold Pinter Theatre later this month with a cast including Martin Jarvis, Nigel Havers, Sian Phillips and Cherie Lunghi.

“I haven’t messed about with the divine Oscar’s world. I’ve just set them in the framework of a rather high class amateur company. It’s a homage to amateur dramatics.”

The Bunbury Company Of Players’ version of The Importance Of Being Earnest will also be appearing at Theatre Royal Brighton from Monday, September 29, to Saturday, October 4 following its West End run.

Theatre plays a big role in Brett’s life – not only is his most famous character an actor, but his wife Lucy is head of development at Chichester Festival Theatre.

“I have always been fascinated by theatre”, he admits. “I love being involved in it.”

He’s happy to write both crime and comedy. “I find them very similar in terms of structure,” he says. “A lot of jokes and scenes in crime novels are based on the unexpected. You set up pointing in one direction, and the pay-off is the joke, or the little detail slipped in which becomes important to the detective.”

His most famous humorous series was How To Be A Little Sod, which many new parents have found solace in.

“It was all written from personal experience, but about 15 years after my children were small,” he says.

“I got a bit of perspective on it. I needed to get away from the sleepless nights.”

For his most recent crime novel series Brett has been drawing on personal experience again, setting them in the fictitious village of Fethering, inspired by his Sussex home.

“I felt this area is fascinating,” he says. “The name came from places like Worthing, Ferring, Angmering and Tarring. I thought Tarring and Fethering worked quite well...”

Despite the fictional location he has still had friends inform him he has got his geography wrong. “Some places are fairly recognisable," he says. “One time a friend of mine said she knew the village and told me the nearest railway station wasn’t Barnham, but Arundel!

“I think it’s strange when you get these tours of Inspector Morse’s Oxford. There is a misunderstanding that writers make things up...”

l Worthing World Of Words Festival patrons Simon Brett and Judy Upton will be talking about their writing careers at the Connaught Studio in Union Place, Worthing on Wednesday, June 18 from 7.30pm. Tickets are £10.50/£7.50. Call 01903 206206.