People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.

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.

If you went for a job interview in a Glasgow law firm, they used to ask you what school you went to. And that was a way of finding out what religion you were.

To have a very strong opinion all the time is corrosive to a person's intellect. It becomes your default position.

A man who thinks he has a higher purpose can do terrible things, even to those he professes to love.

In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there's no real way of having an inner voice without it taking over the entire story.

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.