Janwillem van de Wetering had the unusual distinction of writing most of his 30 books twice. The first version

he wrote in his native Dutch, the second, almost simultaneously in his acquired English. And the two sometimes diverged considerably in their narratives.

From the outset of his career as a writer, van de Wetering aimed for a world market for his thrillers and won a secure place in it. But his native Netherlands, and especially Amsterdam with its right-angled gables and tip-up canal bridges, continued to provide the settings and the inspiration for most of his novels — even though he lived in the US for the last 40 years of his life.

Though Janwillem van de Wetering was born in Rotterdam in 1931, he came to know Amsterdam better than most because for nine years he had pounded its streets and quaysides as a policeman. Before that, he had spent several years roaming the world. After South America, especially Peru and Columbia, he moved to Australia where he earned his living as an estate agent.

With that, he escaped the compulsory military service that all his contemporaries had to do in the Netherlands. To make up for it, when he did return to live in the country, he was compelled to serve as an auxiliary policeman. He loved the spare-time work and rose to the rank of inspector. And the drama and at times depravity he witnessed on the beat fed into his novels for the rest of his long writing life. Possibly because so much of his own life and personality went into his main character, van de Wetering failed to give him a name. In novel after novel he just appears as “de Commissaris”, the Inspector. So the inspector’s two underlings, Grijpstra and de Gier, lent their names to about 15 of his novels.

For years van de Wetering still remained a businessman, running his Amsterdam company mostly by phone from Maine, while writing at night, in the early morning and at weekends. He had learnt the export-import business at his father’s behest in South Africa. From there he moved to South America, where he married for a second time after his early first marriage foundered.

But all the time his spiritual search dominated his life. From late teenage it centred on Zen Buddhism. He spent 18 months in the Daitoku-ji monastery in Kyoto, Japan. It failed to impart to him the enlightenment that he so anxiously sought.

“What did life in the monastery give you,” he was asked in later life. “Nothing,” he replied. “It just relieved me of much ballast. My ideas were ignored. But it taught me that what mattered was what I was doing at any moment, peeling potatoes or weeding garden beds.” And later on writing, and ever more writing.

But if the monastery failed to bring him enlightenment, it did give him insights which enriched the rest of his life and the whole of his creative work. And he developed an unrivalled skill in expounding them effortlessly as part of gripping and worldly narratives. His 1971 non-fiction book The Empty Mirror: Experiences in a Japanese Zen Monastery remains a classic of Zen literature. So does his report on an American Zen community published under the title of A Glimpse of Nothingness: Experiences in an American Zen Community (1975).

But for models of his writing style and the technique of constructing books, he eschewed Eastern writers and chose two French language masters, Georges Simenon for the taut thriller genre and Jean-Paul Sartre for the philosophy. He was awarded the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1984.

Janwillem van de Wetering, writer, was born on February 12, 1931. He died on July 4, 2008, aged 77