There’s a letter on Tony Parsons’ hall table from the Writers’ Guild of America, which he joined when Julia Roberts bought the film rights to his novel The Family Way. He was disappointed when this project didn’t come off, but as he says, if Julia Roberts not turning your book into a movie is the worst thing that happens to you, “then how bad is it? I count my blessings. I don’t come from a background where people are fulfilled by their work. It does toughen you up. I’ve got friends who’ve written good books, got bad reviews and don’t want to write another. That’s not gonna happen to me.”

The letter from the guild informs Parsons that, should he require it, strike pay is available. Judging by the 4 million books he has sold, the BMW in the driveway and the house we’ve just entered, in Hampstead, North London, I don’t think Parsons will need to throw himself on his union’s mercy any time soon. Mind you, I thought his house would be bigger. “It’s a nice area,” he explains. “I didn’t think I’d ever live anywhere like this.” Has he got a mortgage? “Oh yeah. Big mortgage.”

He doesn’t have any other property. As an only child, his parents now dead, he inherited his mum and dad’s place in Billericay. Bobby, 28, the son he had with Julie Burchill when they were married, lives there. “I said to Bob, ‘You can have it if you want it.’ Too many associations for me with my folks.”

Later, when we’re discussing the pros and cons of middle-aged men (he is 54) ticking off younger men misbehaving, he says: “We don’t really get it round here.” With his compact, middleweight frame, I suspect he wouldn’t mind too much if they did. “I’m from Essex, where they’d consider me Mahatma Gandhi. I’m not some sort of thug, but when I’m around my family, someone encroaching on your private sacred space, you want to register your protest.”

On holiday in St Lucia not long ago, three teenage lads, English, were effing and blinding next to the Parsons family at dinner. “I told them to stop. I told them they would stop. They shut up. They could have kicked the shit out of me but it mattered more to me than it did to them. My daughter’s reading My Little Pony and I was prepared to take it all the way. All the way. Wheel my nukes to the border and roll through the shrimp buffet.” He used to do kung fu, has now switched to boxing, believes it should be taught in school. “I think to get through life you have to remember who you are, remember you’re a man. I completely believe that.” His wife told him later his language was worse than the teenagers’ had been.

Parsons is a solicitous, if restless, host. He meets me at the Tube and buys a coffee in a nearby café. Within two minutes, we’re talking about boxing. Another two, and we’re on to the war. “‘Women and girls rule my world,’ as Prince said,” he says, and indeed his success is built on giving the male take on emotional territory usually thought of as reserved for female writers (and readers, two thirds of fiction buyers being female), yet he can talk male stuff with the best of them.

We walk to his house, and for the next three hours, move all over it, from the kitchen to the sitting room, the garden to his top-floor office, Parsons delivering a steady stream of tea and cake. He introduces me to his wife, Yuriko, then she returns to her work (she is a translator) in her office overlooking the kitchen. On the kitchen table is the Daily Mail and a Disney Princess colouring book.

There is no sign of the Mirror, in which he writes a weekly column. “I grew up with the Mirror,” he says. “Sometimes I write stuff and they think, ‘Well, that’s a bit right-wing, that’s not our readership,’ but I know our readers. Two of them were my parents. I know them in my blood and bones.”

He is, for instance, in favour of restoring capital punishment. What for? “Littering, traffic offences…” Good one, I say. “No, I’d bring it back for murder.” These men who have confronted misbehaving youths and been killed, I say, the offenders are often very young. Is he going to start hanging 16-year-olds? He falters, as if he hasn’t thought it through, hard to credit for such an intelligent man; it occurs to me he may be striking a pose. “Hang adults then, how about that? That’s reasonable. If there’s a guy who just wants peace and quiet for his baby, and you take his life, you deserve to have yours taken.” We let that one lie there.

Parsons has a new book out, his fifth since Man and Boy became a publishing phenomenon in 2001. My Favourite Wife is set in China, a country Parsons knows well. He reckons he’s been to Hong Kong (where his best friend lives and works as a lawyer) 50 times in the past 20 years and the mainland more than 30, that total bumped up by a dozen visits to Shanghai as background for this novel. A dozen? “Yeah. I probably did too much research. You want to feel that someone living there would go, ‘Yeah, you got it, that’s my Shanghai.’ It’s going to be published in the PRC and I want it to be a fair and accurate portrayal.”

Parsons had another motivation for the visits: he likes going. “Shanghai isn’t my favourite city in Asia. I prefer Tokyo, Manila, Hong Kong. But Shanghai is the place to be. It’s like New York, a New York for the 21st century. There’s an electricity in the air, it’s where people go to make their fortunes, English lawyers, Australian bar owners, Russian prostitutes, everyone is seduced by the numbers.” Including him. “I found myself thinking, if 0.01 per cent of the population buy my book, that’s the villa in Barbados.”

Prior to his first trip for the book, Parsons hadn’t visited Shanghai for a decade. “It was like going to a new city. It’s a complete free-for-all. You go into a bar in Tokyo and there are rules to be followed, ways to behave. You go into a bar in Shanghai and it’s Dodge City.” If Graham Greene were alive today, says Parsons, “he’d be writing about Shanghai instead of Vienna or Saigon”.

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