Now he's written what could well be one of the best crime novels of the year.

Normal is a book about a man who is just that. He leads a pretty simple life, nice house, tidy garden, he shops at the local supermarket. He's funny and clever and friendly. The only thing different about him is that he kills people, lots of people, and has a woman locked in the basement of his house until he can decide what to do with her.

It's a creepy book, chilling even, but you'll find yourself laughing and rooting for the killer who remains unnamed throughout the book. It feels somewhat inappropriate but Cameron has written a story, and developed characters, that will stay with you well into the night.

"That summer I was sitting there trying to write that terrible book I have since destroyed all evidence of and I had the radio on for some reason," says Cameron.

"I was listening to an interview with a former FBI profiler who had written his first novel and he was talking about the psychology of serial killers and his experiences in profiling them. I found it really fascinating.

"I thought then that one day I would write about serial killers, it was about the time The Silence of the Lambs movie came out in the early 90s and serial killers were all the fashion but, then, there didn't seem to be anything new to say about them.

"And years later when I came back to it the fashion had changed. The movie Hostel had just come out [in 2005] and the only way of saying anything new was pushing the boundaries and making the villain more cartoonishly grotesque and evil and making the crime more and more horrific. I wasn't interested in that either.

"But I had to start writing, so I just sat down and wrote something like that, it was absolutely disturbing, I didn't want to really read it back, it was pretty uncomfortable but within half a chapter it started to turn into something else.

"Because I couldn't stomach what I was actually writing, I had to find a way around it, trying to tell that story in a different way and it quickly developed into what it became, something fairly readable that I hadn't read before."

Cameron, who comes across as friendly, clever and funny, laughs when he talks about the idea of a first novel being a confession. He swears he isn't a serial killer (but how to tell, that's the premise here isn't it?) He swears that the constant ping on his phone during our interview isn't a woman in his basement demanding her dinner.

"But there are ways of reading a story aren't there?" he says.

"If you read between the lines there's a lot of truth in that character for anyone who's been in a controlling relationship, or a situation where you're not literally chaining someone up in the basement, or going out to murder people, but there's a thread running through it about relationships and how people treat each other.

"When I read it back now, knowing what I know, it does kind of make me think about myself and how I could write that stuff. It's been a learning process about who I am and who I've been, the relationships I've been in … and I think that'll strongly inform whatever I write next."

Cameron, 40, lives in Norfolk, in the east of England, where the book is set. He recently took a reporter from the local newspaper on a tour of all the murder sites in the book. The reporter has been seen again.

"Writing is the only thing I've ever applied myself to," he says. "Now I've achieved my life's ambition I really have no idea where to go from here."

But there is another book due out next year. A serial writer in the making.

Normal, by Graeme Cameron. Harlequin. $29.99.