Victoria Blake is no stranger to the heart of Oxford. Her father was Provost of the Queen's College during her childhood and youth. To her, Queen's means home. I asked her whether she identified with Lyra, the child who lives in an Oxford college in Philip Pullman's Northern Lights.

She said: "That depiction of a small girl being brought up in an Oxford college is so brilliant -- things like the way she gets out on to the roof and screams -- not that I screamed, but we could get out on to the roofs when I was a child and look across Oxford. There is the same feeling of living in these extraordinary buildings."

So Victoria Blake spent all her youth here, having been brought up in one college, and having gone to another, Lady Margaret Hall, after she left school.

"It was an incredible privilege. It is such a beautiful city and I have an enormous affection for Queen's."

So did it seem natural to write about this beautiful and enigmatic place that she knew so well? "I had been very wary about writing about Oxford. I have been writing for about eight years, without being published, so I had the opportunity to write about Oxford but had never done so, I think because I found it quite initimidating. How do you approach it?"

Sam Falconer, the heroine of Blake's Oxford-based crime thriller Bloodless Shadow, is not so enamoured with the city as the book's author.

"The perspectives I have given to Sam in the book are quite different to my own. She is much more at odds with it. The first characteristic that I had for Sam was that she was a fighter, a world judo champion. Then I thought -- if you put her in to an upbringing like mine, in an Oxford college, what would that have been like for her? She's very physical and yet she's brought up in a very cerebral environment. I was interested to deal with those kind of conflicts."

Bloodless Shadow is part of Orion's 'New Blood' thriller series promotion, introducing a number of new crime writers in 2004. Presumably after her strong beginning there will be more outings for private investigator Sam Falconer -- will they have Oxford connections?

"Yes, I think I'll continue using Oxford. I've just handed in the second book called Cutting Blades, which is based on somebody going missing in the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. It's balanced between Oxford and Fulham. Hopefully, there will be a third, but that will be dependent on sales. As a first-time writer you head out there and it's very difficult to get noticed." She knows the ins and outs of the publishing and the bookselling industries, having worked for Gerald Duckworth publishers, followed by the Silver Moon bookshop and then for Bookcase, a remaindered bookseller based in London. But her training after university was in the law.

"I gave that up," she says firmly. "I am glad I trained. It was an experience, but I so did not fit it that I knew pretty quickly that I was not going to continue with it. I really enjoyed the academic study, but as far as the practical side is concerned, I was completely at odds with it."

And is there no yearning back to the academia of her extreme youth?

"I really don't know. I'm not sure I'm clever enough -- to put it bluntly -- you do have to be very, very passionate about your subject. I'd be very interested in teaching writing. I have done a number of writing courses and found them really beneficial."

What of the eight years spent trying to write something for publication? Are there any bestsellers lurking at the back of her drawers or hard drive?

"I've definitely got others in the back drawer, but I'm not necessarily going to pull them out, as they are ones I tried to sell and couldn't, so they may well stay there. They gave me practice, although they weren't crime novels."

So what led her to a life of crime? "What led me into crime was that I had not managed to sell these two that I had written. I thought 'let's look at this from a more commercial point of view'. Look at the bestseller lists and what do you see there? Enormous amounts of crime.

"I looked at chick lit, but I wasn't sure you could go dark enough -- for me. It's not that I want to write along purely dark patterns, but it seemed to me that you had to have a happy ending in chick lit -- somebody marrying, or whatever. I have really enjoyed chick lit in parts, I don't feel hostile to it, but for me it would be like doing law -- it just wouldn't fit."

Perhaps Victoria Blake is an example of the adage that crime pays, after all.

Bloodless Shadow is published by Orion at £4.99.