Hull is the only city on Earth where I have pulled my car over to take a picture of a skyline so exquisite I was willing to risk death to stare at it.
The lights of the city flickered like the embers of a dying fire; a necklace of gold weaving through the harp strings of the great bridge that stitches Yorkshire to Lincolnshire. The Humber estuary reflected back a fiery sun and a shotgun-blast of crows and seagulls whirled above of the distant rooftops of the great Victorian buildings. The masts of the pleasure craft that bobbed in the marina disappeared into a purple sky; stirred by a breeze redolent with the mixed scents of sea-spray, crushed fruit and diesel oil.
Hull is also the only city on Earth where I have witnessed a toddler in a pushchair eating a whole roast chicken as he bounced down the cobbles of Whitefriargate and his mam swore into a mobile phone.
A city of contrasts? Perhaps. But one thing is certain: Hull is no longer a national joke. The days of being bottom of the school league tables and top of the list of crap towns, are hopefully very much behind the city. Hull is moving forward. Come 2017, it will be City of Culture. There are plans to host the Baftas (ambitious if not particularly realistic) and next year it will double on screen for wartime London in a new movie about the Blitz.
My first novel, Dark Winter, is being adapted for TV and will be filmed in the city, if all goes according to plan. Hull Truck Theatre continues to stage ground-breaking new plays and the Ferens art gallery houses a breathtaking collection of old masters and new talent. Down in the Old Town there are more museums than you can shake a guidebook at. You have to pass two courts and a police station to get there, but that's Hull. And that's why I write about it.
Since my first novel did rather well I've been in the fortunate position of being asked for my opinions on a lot of things. One of the questions I've been asked by everybody from Spanish bloggers to Richard Madeley, is 'why Hull?'. The truth is, I don't know. It was an untouched canvas, I suppose. Say Oxford and people think Morse, glorious architecture and manicured lawns. London has so many detectives it's amazing they're not chasing one another across that bloody Millennium bridge, which directors can't seem to get enough of.
Yorkshire has been done, of course, but it's all a little too Heartbeat for my tastes. And nobody could accuse Hull of being representative of the rest of the region. This is a city on its own. It's a city at the end of a railway line. It's had the stuffing knocked out of it by the Germans and seen its main industry given away by the politicians who were meant to serve it. And yet, it flourishes. It may look a little ragged around the edges – and there are certain estates where you could be forgiven for wondering why you never heard the air raid – but my God it has character.
Yes, Hull has that certain something. It inspires. This is the city where Philip Larkin served as university librarian and created his enduringly, spearingly accurate lines on life, love and banality. It is where John Godber became a household name. It boasts writers like Russ Litten, Nick Quantrill and Nick Triplow. It's a damn sight more than the setting for an episode of Only Fools and Horses more than 20 years ago.
Last month I was in a bookshop in London, idly wondering why I couldn't find my new paperback on the shelves. I asked a nice young shop assistant and she said that it was "a bit Northern for their customers' tastes". At the time, she was standing next to the biggest display of Scandinavian crime thrillers I have ever bloody seen. Hull was clearly just too alien and inaccessible for the Covent Garden crowd, who yearn for something familiar like Oslo and Copenhagen.
So the answer I give people is, why not? The books I write are grim and dark. Bad things happen to good people. Decent fools fail and justice falls like dead birds from a sky the colour of a church roof. It reflects a world I know. I was a journalist in Hull for a long time. I've sat in the living rooms of the bereaved and the broken and seen them clutch the family album as their last hopes fade. I've seen coppers coughing some gravel into their voices before facing the media because if they don't put on a hard face they'll cry or run home to hug their kids.
Hull is the landscape where I can create such things with any feeling of authenticity. I know the people. I know these streets. And soon, you will too.
• David Mark's third novel, Sorrow Bound, published by Quercus, is out now
