I've never propositioned a man in the Gents before. And certainly not at Lord's. But I'm loathe to squander an opportunity, however awkward.
Mark Billingham is just too incongruous to ignore. Sporting a Hawaiian shirt, a diamond stud and a cowpoke's goatee, he is the only man in a 100-yard radius not in a blazer, MCC tie and a Panama.
Yet he is surprisingly astonished to be recognised as I tap him on the shoulder and ask him for an interview.
Billingham has thrived on such coincidence. He drifted from entry-level TV acting to workaday stand-up to fine writing. As he says: "I wrote 30,000 words on holiday, sent them off and boom: I had a two-book deal. Finally, I was home.
"It's not the norm, I know. One friend of mine wrote 28 unpublished novels before he got a break."
But Billingham, though far from smug, has never looked back. Ten years, 11 books - his latest has just been published - and three million sales on, his laconic detective Tom Thorne has been hailed by critics as "the next superstar" of crime fiction and, as such, is played on screen by his "new best friend", the award-winning actor David Morrissey.
Detective Inspector Thorne is, as tradition dictates, a hard drinking, commitment-phobic maverick with a serious music habit. Morse had classical, Bosch has jazz. Billingham's creation favours country, having shrugged off his short-lived penchant for trip hop and speed garage.
"That was a mistake," says Billingham. "I was spending way too much time researching what Thorne was listening to so I knocked it on the head after the first book. I thought 'Sod it, he can listen to what I listen to: Hank Williams and Johnny Cash'."
But Thorne is too credible to be defined by cliché, his verisimilitude lauded by even hardened police officers. Two star-struck constables recently took Billingham on a pre-riot but bloody night patrol of Croydon.
"They wanted to show me life at the sharp end," he says. "And by God they did. The night started with a body and ended with a body. I loved it."
While Rebus and Morse both relished a puzzle, be it cypher or crossword, Thorne is happiest tackling social inequality: from homelessness to racism. That hunger stems, of course, from Billingham.
Few authors happily disclose the autobiographical elements of their work. As Billingham says warily: "You can write about the most hideous acts of violence and no one thinks you've done them. But one little sex scene, readers instantly think that's you."
Billingham's very career owes itself to an incident in 1999 when he was brutally robbed in a Manchester hotel room. Three men in balaclavas burst in, shouting: "Get on the floor or you're f***ing dead". They beat him up in a two-hour attack and demanded his pin numbers before clearing his accounts.
He says: "I was bouncing off the carpet because my heart was beating so fast. I was terrified. I thought I'd never see my family again."
The men were never caught but the experience left Billingham with a keen empathy - and a conscience - that manifests itself in his books.
"I didn't wake up the next morning saying 'I'm going to write a crime novel'. But it was the missing piece of the jigsaw. I'd read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12.
"I understood fear and I wanted to create characters who made readers say 'Please, don't hurt this guy'. That's the key to suspense. It's easy to disgust a reader. It's much harder to make them care."
Billingham is, however, anything but naive. His finely-drawn victims routinely die in the end. "They don't always," he says, sounding hurt. I tick the ones that do off on my fingers. "OK, OK," he grunts.
For a former stand-up, he has an oddly thin skin.
"I've never believed writers, actors or comics when they say 'I don't read reviews, they don't bother me'. Anybody who says they don't give a s**t is full of s**t. It's human nature to remember the bad stuff.
"That's why I went into stand-up. An actor's life is all about rejection. It's you they don't want, it's you who's too tall or too short or too fat. With stand-up, it doesn't matter what you look like."
But comedy is, surely, an even more masochistic occupation for someone so sensitive to criticism?
"Each time you die, it hurts. But you just have go backstage, have the p**s taken out of you by the other comics and then go and have a pint at the bar. Done. It's all made me a better novelist. Fearless."
Like all great writers, Billingham is a magpie: he uses everything. Even the brickbats go down in his ominous "little black book".
"I get a lot of negative feedback about bad language. It's absurd. Readers will pick up a book and go 'Oh yes, multiple killing, rape, child abuse, lovely, that ticks all my boxes. But the f-word? Oh no.'
"How skewed is that? I jot the emails down in my notebook in case I can use them.
"One read: 'I was in the Royal Navy for 12 years and that word neither shocks or offends me but any writer who sees fit to use the word f**k three times in two pages needs a serious look at a dictionary.'
"I can't be doing with that prissiness."
No one could accuse Billingham of being prissy. Big and brooding, he bristles with a doleful compulsion. Everything has to be just so: from the guitar songbooks stacked precisely on the coffee table to the Victorian stuffed animal collection that demarcates his front room.
He admits: "I do have a touch of OCD and I used to obsess about research. But I'm better than I was. Gone are the days when I would drive to a set of traffic lights to find out if you could turn left. I finally realised it didn't matter. A book will not stand or fall on whether or not there's a branch of Starbucks in Brixton."
Crime writers are a clubbable breed. Mocked and envied by the literary set, they are, as Billingham says neatly, "the smokers of the writing community". Simply, they stick together. Billingham's list of chums reads like a who's who: Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Lee Child.
"We're not a bunch of Jilly Coopers," he says, "there is clearly some darkness there. But we do like to party. Last year at the Harrogate literary festival, our hotel manager said we put more money across the bar in one hour that the entire wedding party did during the whole evening.
"Maybe it's because we get it all out on the page: all that torture in our heads. But we are on the margins. I remember John Sutherland saying that putting a crime writer on the Booker Prize shortlist would be like entering a donkey in the Grand National."
Billingham makes light of "all that torture" but he is not without his scars. Born in Birmingham, firmly working class, his father walked out when he was seven. Eight years later, his mother married again. Money was tight, life gritty.
Two years on - still at school - he moved out, renting a tiny flat in the same block as his grandmother for £11 a week. He doesn't sound to have been overly cherished?
"I didn't see much of my dad. Perhaps every third or fourth weekend. And when my mum remarried, she moved to a new house 25 minutes away. It was just easier for me to move out and live nearer to my school. I got a paper round to pay for it all. I was OK.
"It's not what I'd wish for my own children but families like the Waltons don't exist. And I did understand. My dad was a terrible father. Dreadful. But he had a very difficult childhood. He was fostered - he never knew who his father was. So he had a very different attitude to family and kids. I don't have any issues. I'm not suffering some secret angst."
But he doesn't wholly convince. His every move has suggested a much-needed - and honed - defence mechanism. Billingham has always sought to don a second skin, be it on stage or on paper.
"I was so-so academically at school and I was all right at sport but I was never a star at anything. Then I found that the one thing I could really do was the play. That's how I got validation. Applause."
Billingham went on to read drama at Birmingham - the first of his family to attend university - before joining a small repertory company and moving to London. A string of bit parts followed.
"I was a drug dealer in Juliet Bravo, a copper in Boon and a doctor in Crossroads. I'd have half a dozen lines but no more. I was treading water. So I moved into stand-up. There's no luck involved there. If you keep getting laughs, you'll get booked."
The stand-up put him in contact with Blackadder's Tony Robinson, who was, in 1989, starring in Maid Marian and her Merry Men, a hit BBC children's sitcom. Robinson asked him to co-write the fourth series.
Painstakingly, Billingham learned his craft. Twelve years later, he wrote Sleepyhead, his first Thorne book.
"As with comedy," he says nonchalantly, "I just thought I could do it."
His television tie-up with State of Play actor Morrissey was similarly fortuitous. There is something of Blanche DuBois about Billingham. It must be his faint hangdog air: he attracts the kindness of strangers.
"There was talk of TV early on and if I was ever asked who I thought should play Thorne, I'd say 'David Morrissey'. I thought if I said it often enough it might happen.
"By chance, David picked up one of my books. He liked it and Googled me. Bingo. Up popped his name. The next thing I know a meeting has been arranged. But the day before, my wife Claire finds herself standing next to him on the platform at Highgate Tube.
"In that very safe married way that couples have, she's got a thing for him: he's on her 'allowed' list. I've got Cate Blanchett on mine. So Claire goes: 'I'm honestly not a stalker but you're meeting my old man tomorrow'. As an ice-breaker, it was fabulous.
"When I went round to David's house, I said: 'Sorry, my wife's been stalking you'. We've become genuine mates - we're not hugely dissimilar. He just happens to be younger and better looking. It works. He's told me: 'Thorne is the best part I've ever played'. And I believe him."
The books and the lucrative Sky deal - another three novels are being serialised next year - have earned Billingham a vast house in north London with Andy Warhols cluttering the wall, a cottage in the Cotswolds, a holiday home in California and a top-of-the-range Jaguar. His two teenage children both attend private schools.
But he's charmingly sensible. Unlike his pal Connelly - who has the most expensive smile I have ever seen - his less-than-white teeth will "always," he says, "be quintessentially English".
Even his Panerai watch is a £40 fake.
"I tick over but this isn't a job for life. What happens if it all goes wrong? I'm very risk averse. I've never invested in anything. I want to know it's there if it all goes tits up. "
He makes one last stab at a smile. Again, he just misses.