Journalism Is A Darwinian Process.

Crime Is A Very Hard Genre To Feminise. If You Have A Female Protagonist She Is Going To Be Looking After Her Mum When She Gets Older; She Is Going To Be Worried About Her Brother And Sister; She Will Be Making A Living While Bringing Up Kids.

I'd Read So Much Right-wing Crime Fiction Where They Find The Evidence And Shoot The Bad Guy - I Thought There Must Be Another Approach.

I Respond Very Well To Rules. If There Are Certain Parameters It's Much Easier To Do Something Really Good. Especially When Readers Know What Those Are. They Know What To Expect And Then You Have To Wrong-foot Them. That Is The Trick Of Crime Fiction. And Readers Come To Crime And Graphic Novels Wanting To Be Entertained, Or Disgusted.

Because I Write A Book A Year, I Always Want To Do One Other Project Every Year That's Stimulating In A Different Way. It Means You Can Be Working But Not Using Up Your Prose Juice, You Know?

There's Always These Giant Baffling Books, Like 'the Da Vinci Code.' People Say It's Not As Well Written As 'midnight's Children.' Why Aren't People Reading 'midnight's Children?' Nobody Knows Why These Phenomenons Happen But They're Great.