I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.

I expect that my readers have been to Europe, I expect them to have some feeling for a foreign language, I expect them to have read books - there are a lot of people like that! That's my audience.

If you can live in Paris, maybe you should.

My novels are about the European reality, not about chases. You want chases, get somebody else's books.