I get asked to read new works a lot, in the hope that I will give a quotation and I will only give a 'puff' for a book I truly love.

There's no question that ghosts exist. The big question for me is whether ghosts are simply electronic imprints left in the walls or the atmosphere of places, or whether they do actually represent something from the afterlife.

My day starts with Radio 4's Today live or 'listen again' wherever I am in the world, thanks to digital radio - I even have an app on my iPhone that receives it.

If you and I took a walk down a shopping street in Jo'burg or Cape Town or London, we see two guys looking in a shop window, we think, "Oh, they're wondering what they're going to buy." A cop looks at them and thinks, "Why are they standing there? Are they doing a drug deal? Are they going to mug someone? Are they going to rob the shop?"

I think that Brighton, for a crime writer, is almost like a character.

I travel abroad constantly on book promotion and research, and the Internet is invaluable to me for accessing U.K. news in places such as America, which most of the time hasn't heard of England.

Stalin was experimenting with telepathy in the 1930's. Winston Churchill had a paranormal office, trying to get people to travel out of their bodies and see behind enemy lines in the Second World War. And the Pentagon... The X-Files is based on a real department in the Pentagon, that's still there now. Pretty much every government, probably as far back in time as we can go, has one. And the police will quite often - and when I say often, I mean often - they will go to mediums if all else fails in the enquiry.