Mike Hollow was born in 1953 in the Essex County Borough of West Ham and spent his early years in Romford. After studying Russian and French at Cambridge University he worked for the BBC for sixteen years and then the international development agency Tearfund for eleven before going freelance as a writer and editor in 2002. He lives in Hampshire with his wife Margaret and has two grown-up children who live in London. Nowadays he earns his living translating Russian in his cellar and spends the rest of his time writing stories about Detective Inspector John Jago, the Blitz Detective. The first novel, Direct Hit, was published in 2015, and Fifth Column is the second in the series.