Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.

Music is an important part of my writing process.

What Brighton's got is a major sea port on either side, good for importing drugs, great for exporting cash, stolen cars, stolen antiques. It's got the largest number of antique shops in the UK, so it's a great place to fence stolen goods. It's got tremendous communication: you've got the sea ports, you've got the channel tunnel, you've got Gatwick Airport 25 minutes away, and London's 50 minutes away by train. So all these escape routes... Which is what villains like.

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.

The crime genre's always been regarded very well by the literary end of the book world, whereas horror, although it had that spell in the late eighties, by and large, it's sort of ghetto-ized, and considered to be exploited literature.

Most of us have one big idea at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance of serendipity.

I've always been much more scared of the living than I am of the dead.