THE Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbo has what he considers to be the perfect writing room. It’s a large attic room with picturesque views looking out across the Oslo hills. In it, Nesbo has installed a top-of-the-range computer, state-of-the-art music soundsystem, a fridge, TV, couch, guitar and espresso machine. It’s everything a writer could want and more. There’s just one small problem.

He can’t actually write in it.

Instead, each morning Nesbo closes the door to his ideal office and heads down to a nearby coffee shop. It’s not a big cafe – he has to get there early to get one of the two small tables he can write at. But it works for him – over the 15 years he has been visiting the cafe, he has written a string of bestsellers.

I was reminded of this story by a more local crime writer, Fergus McNeill, whose first two novels are set in and around Salisbury.

McNeill, the first of the guest novelists at the Salisbury Writing Circle for 2017, lives just across the border in Hampshire, but wrote much of his first books in the Salisbury branch of Boston Tea Party. McNeill is far from the only one to use the city’s cafes to write in: Listen closely and the tap-tap-tap of ideas on to laptops is everywhere.

What is it about cafes that make them such good places to write in? There’s something to do with the atmosphere, for sure; the requisite amount of white noise in the background to still the mind and allow you to focus. And then there’s the caffeine; the fuel of fiction. Jo Nesbo says of his writing cafe of choice that ‘it’s nothing special... but they have good coffee.’ Over the past year or so, coffee in the city has come of age.

The arrival of a whole host of independent coffee shops have brought with them a wider variety of coffee know-now and more interesting spaces to write in.

Places like the Coffee Lab on Blue Boar Row, offering a little bit of London while looking out over the market square; the crisp coolness of Culture Coffee on Fisherton Street, whose espressos are as strong as their Wi-Fi signal; and the excellent Exodus Coffee out in Churchfield’s, one of Salisbury’s best kept secrets.

There’s no time like the New Year to finally give that novel you’ve been meaning to write a shot.

And if you need an extra shot to get started, there are plenty of baristas in the city who’ll be happy to help.

Follow Tom Bromley on Twitter @bromleyesq.