Rummaging through old newspaper cuttings, I came across a curious quote from Patrick Woodrow. The novelist and creator of two successful adventure thrillers sees himself “as a storyteller rather than a writer”. I’m intrigued by what he means.

He spends his days holed up at home in the old bakery at Bucknell, near Bicester, toiling away on chapter after chapter of freewheeling prose, so he is indisputably a writer. Why is he so shy about the term?

“I don’t suggest for a minute that I write bad literature, but the most important thing is to tell the story and keep the reader turning the pages,” he explains. “That’s why I try to keep my chapters short and have a hook at the end of each one. If you get too flowery with your writing and you start turning out lavish, Dickensian prose, you’re going to quickly alienate people. Telling the story is what’s important.”

With a first-class degree from Cambridge, he has been steeped in literature from an early age but always objected to the turgid, torrid prose that gets literary critics all aflutter but leaves the average airport book-buying customer distinctly unbothered.

His latest offering, First Contact, plunges readers headlong into the humid forests of Papua New Guinea: a brother and sister are lost, after their guides are brutally murdered by tribesmen; they make their way back to civilisation, but soon their jungle experience proves to have dark implications for the pair of them.

It’s a dizzying spinning-wheel of a tale, where pace is king, although it is flecked with the odd deft, writerly touch: an inventive turn of phrase here, an imaginatively chosen verb there. “I don’t think I’m a bad writer for a second,” he says. “But the key is to get across your sense of urgency and excitement without having to have loads of long, descriptive passages. My agent once told me that to write a good thriller you have to appeal to everyone from high court judges to the man on the street.”

First Contact is his second novel. His first, Double Cross, about an underwater photographer who finds himself the prime suspect in a homicide, was published in 2005. After Cambridge, where he tired of consuming literary classics by the gallon (“when you have to read three or four George Eliot novels in a week and then go off and write an essay, it goes in one ear then out the other”), he embarked on a career in management consultancy and found that, despite always fostering a secret desire to become a novelist, he actually rather enjoyed it and stayed on for ten years.

But spurred on by Cambridge chum and successful thriller writer Boris Starling (author of the TV-adapted Messiah), he took the best part of a year off to have a stab at finally writing a book.

“I knew it was high risk,” he says. “But because I’d had the English training, I thought I had a decent chance of doing it. I do take pride in that I took that risk to follow my dream and so far, so good.”

Escapism is at the heart of his books. He wants readers to see the world through his fiction. His first book was set in the Caribbean and the Far East, his second largely in Papua New Guinea, while the novel he’s currently working on flits between the Himalayas and the South Atlantic. His idea is that there will be a kaleidoscope of different landscapes across his tetralogy of books: underwater, jungle, mountain, then desert for his fourth.

He said: “I’m trying to throw open the windows a little bit, write about the great outdoors, showcase exotic locations.” Given that he carves out these imaginary landscapes from his idyllic Oxfordshire home (with a “very English view of the village church from his window”), I wonder if he ever has difficulty conjuring up these exotic places, but he brushes this concern aside: “We went to Papua New Guinea for our honeymoon in 2007. I have photos to remind me as well. It’s all fairly fresh.”

Living in Bucknell with wife Sally-Ann and their baby daughter, he’s been an active campaigner against the two waste incinerators earmarked for Oxfordshire.

With his thriller writing career firmly in place, his risky decision to throw in the management consultancy seems to be paying off. But when will he know that he’s finally arrived?

“If you look at the really successful writers, it all really starts to happen for people from about book five onwards,” he says, not missing a beat. “By then, when you pick up a new reader, they hopefully will pick up your back catalogue. So with every new book, I’m hopefully building a fanbase.”

l First Contact is published by Arrow Books at £7.99.