SHE was hooked from the moment she put pen to paper to write, first, her assignment on Sherlock Holmes and then a longer dissertation on Miss Marple.

“It meant I could watch Joan Hickson and it was classified as research,” Kate Jackson laughs now.

“I moved on from there through all the well-known crime writers and kept on going – I’ve read around 1,000 crime fiction books now and I have barely scratched the surface.”

Joan Hickson’s television take on Miss Marple aside – oh, and possibly the Father Brown series too, set as it is in the 1950s – Kate is none too keen on the type of crime presented on our big and small screens.

No, not for her the graphic violence that tends to go with it. “I have a good memory, so I travel around with the images in my head,” she said.

Rather, the altogether more quaint and genteel approach of vintage fiction that focuses on the detective with a damnably fiendish case to solve.

At the comparatively tender age of 26, Kate stumbled upon a mystery of her own.

Living and breathing crime fiction as she does – including writing a blog and contributing articles to professional publications – she wanted to be able to relax with something like a puzzle book that would tap into her knowledge.

The discovery that there wasn’t one out there called for only one solution. “I just thought I’ll have to do it myself then,” she said.

She duly got in touch with the British Library Crime Classics publishing house, floated her idea to them and, hey presto, 18 months later, she now has the first hard copy off the presses in her hands.

Called The Pocket Detective, the 100plus puzzles include word searches, anagrams, crosswords, ‘spot the difference’, and quizzes such as ‘match the murder victim to the Agatha Christie novel they appear in’.

“I mainly drew on the 55 or 60 books in the British Library Crime Classics series,” said Kate, “but I also included Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, who aren’t in the collection, because their appeal helped me broaden the offer.”

A pre-publication batch pretty much sold out at this year’s Bodies from the Library conference, held at the British Library to celebrate the golden age of detective fiction.

She’s looking forward, therefore, to seeing it on bookshelves after its official publication date of October 18.

Kate, who lives next door to her parents on their smallholding in Dotland, in Hexhamshire, spends many hours reading each week.

A dreadful combination of fibromyalgia, a long-term condition that causes pain all over her body, chronic fatigue syndrome, type one diabetes and tinnitus limits her days to doing a bit of tutoring in literacy and teaching English as a second language for students mainly based in Hexham.

The holder of a First Class degree in English, she also spends one afternoon each week volunteering with the Action Foundation in Newcastle, teaching English to asylum seekers.

A year ago, she also launched Coffee and Crime, a gift box business she runs over the internet that presents the lucky recipient with a couple of vintage crime novels, a packet of top-notch coffee, two or three related gifts and a newsletter bearing Kate’s beautifully-crafted and informative articles.

They are all about aspects of vintage crime stories, of course.

She said: “I love them because most of them were written contemporary to the times, so you get a real sense of, say, the 1930s or 1940s.

“How did they interact with the subject of the Second World War, for example, or with the role of women in society?

“You can simply enjoy the mystery element of the book, but you can also look at the books from a thematic point of view as well.

“I do read modern crime novels as well.

“But the thing is, I just keep thinking ‘I’ve seen that before’ and ‘that’s not new’.”