WHO WOULDN’T jump at the chance to work in a tropical paradise, live in a luxury hotel suite, drive a jeep, learn to scuba dive and even buy a share in a speedboat? So obviously British detective Richard Preston signed up straight away.

However, when he finally got round to fighting crime in the Royal Cayman Islands Police, he found life in the infamous Caribbean tax-haven far more interesting than he could ever have imagined.

Now he has written a wonderful memoir, The Real Death In Paradise, recounting his two idyllic years as one of 12 young police officers seconded to the tropical paradise.

Currently enjoying its 14th season, Death In Paradise draws a regular audience of eight million to its warming, whodunnit plots.

And while Richard says the BBC’s Caribbean “cosy-crime” series is entirely realistic, he admits: “To be honest, if anything the series is underplayed.”

Now 65, he was 29 when he took up his two-year posting on the 22-mile long island.

His work included preventing turtle egg kidnapping, busting a rum smuggling ring and capturing murderous pirates.

He even had a voodoo curse put upon him “by a vicious witchdoctor”.

“When I saw the first series a decade ago, I kicked myself,” he recalls, laughing. “I thought, ‘This is my idea’ – there, on the screen.”

For years, he had been planning to write up the journal he kept throughout his secondment, but his work as a counter-terrorism officer kept getting in the way.

“When I watched a couple of the earliest episodes, I thought there was a direct connection with my own experience of being a policeman on a Caribbean island, with the sunshine and all the strange happenings.

“But many of the real events were even stranger than those in the TV series. In fact, a few things happened to me which made me think, ‘This could not have happened anywhere else in the world’.