Simon Brett was born on 28 October 1945 in Surrey, England, and educated at Dulwich College and Wadham College, Oxford. He worked for about a decade as a BBC radio producer, including on the pilot of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, before moving to London Weekend Television and then, from 1979, becoming a full-time writer. He has published more than eighty novels across several series, among them the long-running Charles Paris mysteries following a jobbing actor turned amateur detective; Generalprobe für Mord, listed here, is the German translation of An Amateur Corpse, the fourth in that series. He served as president of the Detection Club from 2000 to 2015 and was appointed OBE in 2016.
As of 2026 Brett, aged 80, continues to publish, with a new Charles Paris novel released in May 2026.