Rod Madocks has worked in maximum security units housing some of the country's most prolific killers. His experiences provided him with a wealth of material for a fictional account of life on the inside. LYNETTE PINCHESS reports.

RON Madocks has come into contact with some of Britain's most disturbed and dangerous killers.

Working in maximum security hospitals gave him a unique insider's view of life in units like Rampton in north Notts – and the inspiration for a novel.

Characters and incidents in No Way To Say Goodbye are entirely fictional – anything else would, of course, be unethical. But Rod has drawn upon his professional experiences to devise a complex cast of violent and unstable patients.

He's not making a moral observation or trying to preach; rather he describes his work as a crime novel, a tale of love found and lost and a ghost story.

"The mental health system in my book is simply a canvas against which my characters play out their conflicts," said Rod, who specialised in forensic mental health during his 20 years in the field.

Set in Nottingham and Retford (called by it's old name of Redford), the book spans three decades and revolves around the mysterious disappearance of the lover of mental health worker Jack Keyse in 1986. He uses his professional contacts to get close to those he holds responsible, to try to understand and to seek revenge.

As a clinician, Rod routinely visited high and low security units, as well as prison units holding menta lly ill offenders. But it took him a decade to turn his ideas into a novel.

"I determined on a theme early on and built it up slowly. At the time I had to undertake long commuter drives across the country, seeing patients in one secure establishment or another," he said.

"I passed the time by recording the initial narrative structure of the novel onto cassette tapes as I drove." He spent his evenings and weekends typing away.

Rod said the popular myth that working in mental health is harrowing didn't prove to be true for him.

"The truth is that most of us enjoyed the work in the main and like soldiers, we developed a detachment and humour that saw us through the more difficult days.

"In the early part of my career I felt privileged to be allowed to work with people in this way and I stayed longer doing this work than any other.

"In later years the responsibilities became more onerous, yet I never stopped thinking that this was a worthwhile thing to do as long as one remained hopeful for one's clients."

Rod was a clinician for many years before switching to mental health planning and administration.

He settled for a career in mental health, having gone from university academia – working nights in a petrol station to fund his research – to a professional gardener and furniture restorer in the 1980s.

He's already working on novel number two, this time an imaginative reconstruction of the crime of 19th century Devon servant John Babbacombe Lee, who became known as "the man they couldn't hang".

Convicted of murdering his mistress, he survived three attempts to execute him when the trapdoor of the scaffold failed to open. Instead, he was committed to life imprisonment.

Nottingham has been Rod's adopted home on and off for more than 30 years. He was born in Africa in the 1950s in a village in Northern Rhodesia after his parents went there to work in civil administration.

And there lies another idea for a book. "My childhood in Africa was an extraordinary experience – a world that is quite vanished now. As a child in remote parts of what is now Zambia, we sometimes used to pass old deserted settlements that had been taken over by the bush and ground down by the rains.

"The Africans called those places Chibolya – the abandoned place. When I get around to writing about that period, those last years of the British in Africa, I think I will call the book Chibolya."

As a five-year-old he made a fleeting appearance in a television documentary.

"Somewhere there is a BBC film of my father striding through the bush in a safari suit with a rifle. It showed me next to my mother waving my father off on an expedition on the side of a dusty road."

No Way To Say Goodbye £9.99 is published by Five Leaves Publications.