I've read that you started re-writing books such as those by Roald Dahl, how did this process develop into writing on your own?
Everyday I try “to practice writing” as well as to actually write. So I often take a particular passage I admire and, first, copy it out in long-hand, then re-write it in a different tense, or in a different person / voice (e.g. switching first to third, or third to second person), or remove all adjectives and adverbs and so on, to find out how the particular passage of writing works. I’ve done this since I was quite young and I hope it has helped me to become a better writer.
It's fair to say that you blend fiction with real-life fact and speculation, how for you, does real-life events help you create your novels? Have you ever written something completely imagined?
Yes, much of my first published novel Nineteen Seventy-four was “imagined” the two unpublished novels before it were also “imagined”. However, for me, there is so much of the world that I do not understand, so many real-life stories that hold so much mystery, that I can’t really see the point of making up other worlds or other mysteries. But this is a position not unique to me; from earliest times, poetry and plays have, more-often-than-not, been based on instances that actually happened. The more recent rise of the “imagined novel” is the exception.
Are you comfortable with the label crime writer and what initially piqued your interest in crime?
People can call me what they want (and they usually do). But I write about crime—“true crimes”–because I believe that crimes happen in actual places and actual times for actual reasons. These crimes—and the way in which they are investigated and reported—can often show us a great deal about the time and place—the society—in which they happened. It is perhaps naivety, or maybe arrogance, but I also believe that only through trying to understand why particular crimes happen in particular times and places to particular people do we ever have any hope of preventing them happening again. So that is why I write novels about crimes.
Why are a lot of your books written in series form? Do you find the confines of a novel too small a space to expand on your subject matter?
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