WHEN Matt Johnson was discharged from a long and distinguished career in the police force with PTSD in 1999, his counsellor advised that writing down his thoughts and feelings could help act as a form of therapy.

With nothing to lose and keen to help get a better perspective on his inner turmoil, the cop of 25 years put pen to paper. It was like the unblocking of a dam.

The words came thick and fast and flowed like a torrent of thought from the subconscious shadowlands into the crystal clear pool of the conscious mind.

Traumatic events that had wormed their way into his psyche throughout his career were all summoned to the surface and seen in a new light.

The 1982 Regent’s Park bombing, being blown off his feet at the 1992 terrorist attack at the London Baltic Exchange, and the fatal shooting of his friend and colleague Yvonne Fletcher at the 1984 Libyan embassy shootings were just a few of the memories Matt forced himself to confront again.

The more he wrote, the better he was able to process the raw experience responsible for his PSTD and make some sort of order out of the chaos.

Matt himself describes the process as, “Similar to the cleaning up of a hard drive." He explained, "If you look at the picture of the hard disc of a computer before and after the defragmentation process, it’s very different. Prior to defragmenting the disc is chaotic and lacking order, Post de-fragmentation it becomes orderly, structured and everything is in the right place. If you think of the brain as a hard drive and the damage PTSD can do, well for me, writing had the same effect as defragmentation. It helped clear up the mess!"

The first inkling Matt had of the buried trauma that was gnawing away at him silently and unobserved for years was when he was called to the scene of a girl who had fallen from a rooftop during a party.

It was a trigger moment.

As the paramedics strived to save the girl all he could see was Yvonne Fletcher in the same situation in 1984. It was a surreal experience and releasing that what he was seeing wasn’t real had a profound impact.

Matt explained, “Later I learned that the initial trigger for PTSD tends to be an incident of overwhelming terror that causes hormonal changes in the brain resulting in recollection of the event being temporarily suspended from conscious memory but committed to sub-conscious memory."

In the following weeks and months, Matt would suffer further flashbacks, unsettling feelings of being overwhelmed in crowds, and insomnia

He said, “I experienced symptoms of hyper-arousal and hyper-vigilance, a sensation of being overly aware of perceived threat and of having to either remove myself from it or to take steps to reduce it. For example, I still find that I have to avoid crowds. The first indication I will get is one of raised body temperature and I struggle to focus on my surroundings and soon become overwhelmed by a need to ‘get away’ too somewhere cooler and quieter.”

As PTSD slowly took hold Matt would sleep less and when he did he would be plagued by nightmares. The less he slept the more irritable he became, which in turn would feed his anxiety until both body and mind reached breaking point.

After being rushed to the doctors with all the symptoms of a heart attack, Matt was told the chest pain and numbness in his hands were caused by a panic attack. It was recommended that he see a counsellor to speak about his feelings.

Talking didn’t come easy. He was articulate enough and had the vocabulary at his disposal but he found he couldn’t discuss his experiences and feelings without being overwhelmed by emotion and so Matt was advised to try a different tact.

At first, capturing his most personal thoughts and feelings in words was an emotionally challenging experience for the former Inspector.

“Digging up all those raw experiences again wasn’t easy but allowing them to stay buried wasn’t an option either. By writing them down and making them real again I could confront them, discuss them with my counsellor, and find an effective way of dealing with them,” he explained.

By revisiting his negative and harrowing experiences through writing, Matt was able to stop reliving them and finally let the past go.

The counsellor was so impressed with Matt’s faculty with words she advised him to write a non-fiction book about his experiences.

Matt laughed at the idea but the seeds of an idea were sown that took root a few years later.

Matt told the Chronicle, “I never considered myself a writer. Although I was something of an avid reader as a youngster and devoured everything from James Herbert to Isaac Asimov, like a lot of people, once I entered the workplace, I didn’t just have a lot of time for reading other than one or two paperbacks a year when on holiday.

“But all that reading must have paid off because in hindsight I can see now that I always took a lot of pride in writing police reports and it was something I enjoyed because through words I could help paint a fuller picture of a crime scene or incident for a magistrate of jury.

“In fact I became something of a go-to person for a lot of my colleagues when they needed something writing. I was once even tasked with writing a speech on noble cause corruption for the Commissioner.”

It was only after a divorce and move to Wales that Matt decided to take up the pen again and make a serious go of it.

Matt explained, “I suddenly found myself in my early fifties with a lot of time on my hands, and rather than become addicted to daytime TV I thought I’d have a crack at writing a novel.”

That novel became the first outing for Royal Protection Robert Finlay and was called ‘Wicked Game.’ It was the first instalment in a successful trilogy.

The book is about a police officer haunted by his past and forced to deal with terrorists who start murdering his old colleagues.

Although Matt shares many similarities with Finlay, they both served in the army and suffered from PTSD, the novel is far from autobiographical.

Yet Matt is quick to point out that although he hasn’t encountered a lot of the extremely dangerous situations Finlay is forced to face, he did pour a lot of his personality into the character, particularly the way he responds to challenges.

“They always advise you to write about what you know,” explained Matt, “And what I know a lot about is policing and PTSD. There’s a lot of both in ‘Wicked Game.’ And I think its authenticity is what helps give me the edge in what is a very overcrowded genre. There are a lot of people writing cop thrillers, and no disrespect, but for many authors all that knowledge is learned second-hand as opposed to lived experience. I was fortunate enough to have a wide range of recollections and detailed knowledge of that world to draw upon.”

Once the book was finished, Matt hit the brick wall familiar to many aspiring authors - blanket rejection!

“After being knocked back more times than I care to count I self-published ‘Wicked Game’ through the Amazon platform for independent authors and began the game of promoting it on social media,” explained Matt.

Sales trickled in slowly and then surged on the back of readers’ recommendations. Matt then enjoyed a stroke of luck that would make all the difference.

When Belfast-based author Antony Loveless was in Afghanistan he happened to ask an RAF Chinook force loadmaster what he was reading on his Kindle. It was ‘Wicked Game.’ On the recommendation of the loadie, Loveless read it and was so impressed he recommended it to his literary agent.

Matt told the Chronicle, “Agents are like gatekeepers to the publishing world. Once you’ve got one on board, that’s the first hurdle out of the way. There are subsequent hurdles but getting an agent is the big one.

“Once the agent had interviewed me as a prospect and added me to his company’s list, he found me a choice of interested publishers. In the end, I went with the lady with the friendliest face and the one I clicked most with. Her name was Karen Sullivan. She owned Orenda books and I was impressed by her enthusiasm and motivation.”

Being with an established publishing house was a learning curve for Matt. He explained they gave him invaluable advice on how to make his book a lot better, and after a period of re-writing and editing, a new version of ‘Wicked Game’ was released to the public.

This was followed by ‘Deadly Game,’ ’End Game’ and ‘ Crow 27’ which all featured Robert Finlay.

Matt’s latest book, ‘No Ordinary Day’ is non-fiction and is a detailed investigation into the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher. It asks why the government failed to hold her killers to book.

It's an unflinching account of espionage, betrayal, terrorism, corruption, and murder and has been described by crime writer and screenwriter Matthew Hall as having, “All the ingredients of a le Carre novel, only it’s real.”

‘No Ordinary Day’ won both the Readers’ Choice and Book Of The Year Award at the CrimeCon UK True Crime Awards.

It has also been shortlisted for the Crime Writer’s Association annual Gold Dagger Award.

Yet as nice as the awards are, for Matt the real satisfaction of ‘No Ordinary Day’ comes from telling a tale and exposing a political scandal that he feels has been brushed under the carpet for the past 40 years.

Matt explained, “No Ordinary Day came about after I met up with an old colleague named John Murray at a memorial event a few years ago. John was a close friend of Yvonne and had made her a promise as she lay dying that those responsible would be brought to justice. For nearly 40 years John had campaigned to that end and had amassed a wealth of material pertaining to the case but he was blocked at every turn because of the secrecy surrounding the Libyan embassy shootings.

“I said he should write a book but he said he didn’t know the first thing about writing but said, ‘You do!’ I was a bit reluctant at first but John can be quite persuasive and so I set to work.”

After losing himself knee-deep in research, an incredible political scandal began to come to light.

Matt told the Chronicle, “The big question in this case was, although the gunmen who killed Yvonne Fletcher at the anti-Gaddafi demonstration outside the Libyan embassy were known to the government, they were never charged, Why? It transpires it was because the government had done a secret deal with Gaddafi to buy oil on the cheap in a bid to smash the miners union and put an end to their strike.”

Matt explained that the government believed if they had enough oil in reserves to keep the UK’s power stations running they wouldn’t need coal and felt they would have the miners quite literally over a barrel. The only trouble was, that they had breached sanctions to bring the oil in and couldn’t risk their deal being exposed.

Matt added, “Gaddafi fully exploited the position the government had put themselves in by using the arrangement to send his assassins to the UK to kill anyone he perceived as an enemy or threat. He knew the government was reliant on his oil and therefore powerless to make him accountable for the various bombings and shootings which happened during that period.

“Poor Yvonne was in the wrong place at the wrong time and became a casualty of corruption. Her killers were never brought to book because they were Gaddafi’s men and the government couldn’t risk upsetting the dictator.

“It’s a sad indictment of politics and it had serious consequences for policing in this country. The book is testimony to John’s courage and determination to find justice for Yvonne. Looking back, it's a book I feel I was always meant to write."