There is no hiding place for a bobby on the beat on the North York Moors, Mike Pannett tells Steve Pratt. Now, after 20 years in the force, he is writing about the people.

and places he encountered as a country copper ONE night in 1997, BBC producers walked into policeman Mike Pannett’s quiet office in Malton. They were looking for places where, as he puts it, “things didn’t happen”

for a series on rural policing.

The programme makers ended up staying a year and, in the process, put Pannett on the trail of a new career as a writer.

His second book, You’re Coming With Me Lad: Tales Of A Yorkshire Bobby, is published this week with more tales of rural policing from the York-born former policeman who spent 20 years in the force.

“A lot of people who read the first, Now Then Lad, will get a surprise. I think the second is a step up the league,” he says from his home in a small village in the shadow of the North York Moors.

“People say it’s like stepping back a bit in time, but what we are lucky to have still, especially in North Yorkshire, is a great sense of community. There’s no hiding place, people know who you are and you can seem to make a difference.”

No one really knew much about the first book, he says, because there was little promotion apart from him “going round to the shops in Yorkshire”. The book really took off after being serialised in a national newspaper.

He always knew he had enough about a Yorkshire bobby for a series. He said: “My wife, Ann, and I sat down at home and created charts of what we thought were the storylines. We realised there was so much material, it was just a question of mapping it out.”

He’s always had an idea about getting into print. Growing up in a rural community in North Yorkshire, it was all vet James Herriot on TV in All Creatures Great and Small. It was geared around the area in which he lived and he loved the characters. He also has a connection with another Yorkshire series of books – his wife’s cousin, Peter Walker, wrote the original Heartbeat novels.

His time serving in the Met Police was something of a detour that happened by accident.

He’d joined the Territorial Army when he was 18, while working full-time on a farm, “because I could watch York City for nothing on Tuesday nights as the barracks was next to the ground”.

At 24, he faced a choice – join the Army as an officer, or North Yorkshire Police. The snag was that this force wouldn’t take new recruits who wore glasses. But the London Met would accept him, so he went there with the intention of doing his two years probation and then transferring back to North Yorkshire.

It was his first time away from home and family.

“It’s like breaking the umbilical cord. I was still very much a home lad,” he says.

“When I sat down on the train after being waved off, I saw a headline in The Sun that read Sex, Drugs And Rock’n’Roll about incidents at Hendon Police training school.”

He wondered what he’d let himself in for going down South. He needn’t have worried. “I had such a fantastic time there and did so many varieties of jobs, from surveillance to work on murder squads,” he says.

“I built up fantastic connections with the West Indian community. I ended up joining the Met Police riot squad, which kept you fit.”

Then, as Pannett puts it, “I woke up one morning and missed fly fishing”. A return to his native Yorkshire was called for and he opted for what he expected would be a “really nice peaceful life” policing 600 sq miles of God’s own country.

HE says: “In many ways it was far more dangerous than working in the Met. Because in the Met you are never many minutes away from back-up, while in North Yorkshire your back-up is half-an-hour away, if they can find you.

“Or you might be somewhere with no signal up on the moors. It was a different type of policing altogether. That’s when I started to enlist the help of local farmers, gamekeepers and other locals – and when I started to meet all these great characters.”

He accumulated a cast of characters to populate his books, with incidents based around real-life happenings, although people and places are altered to ensure no one can recognise themselves. He still bumps into villains he arrested when he was younger. There’s a great deal of respect each way, he says. “I was quite a tough guy, but always very straight and honest, and that goes a long way as a rural copper.

You have to have that trust and respect.”

He left the police and set up Twiggy’s, a children’s play centre in Thirsk, with a business partner to provide a small income. Then he set about writing his first book.

The BBC’s Country Cops series had given him a degree of fame, with a fan base of people up and down the country. He’d always kept notes which proved a helpful way to jog his memory about stories for the books.

“A lot of police officers had a lot of stories to tell and I’m lucky in that I have a few more than others,” says Pannett. “The policing stories are true, but I changed things to protect people’s identities. I’ve drawn on various colleagues I’ve worked with over the years.”

When he’s completed his Yorkshire bobby series, he’s confident he has the material for several books about his time in the Met. He’s also thinking about a childhood memoir.

A TV series based on the books must be a possibility.

“You never know,” he says vaguely. “At the moment let’s just see what happens. Everything is going really well and I’m delighted.”

■ You’re Coming With Me Lad is published by Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99, on Thursday.

MIKE PANNETT book signings take place on: June 25 – Hoopers, Malton, at noon and Waterstone’s, York, at 6.30pm; June 27 – Waterstone’s, Northallerton, at 11am, and Waterstone’s, Darlington, at 2pm; June 28 – Whitby Tourist Information, at 11am, and Whitby Bookshop, at 1pm; July 2 – W H Smith, York, at 1pm; July 3 – Wates, Scarborough, at 1pm, and Bijou, Easingwold, at 6pm; July 5 – White Rose Bookshop, Thirsk, at 2.30pm.