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

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

And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini's armies in Albania, on the Greek frontier, one wasn't sure what came next. So, don't trust the telephone. Or the newspapers. Or the radio. Or tomorrow.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.

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

I'm not really a mass market writer.

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