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.

Music is an important part of my writing process.

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.

Brighton has two universities. It's got a massive young, middle-class community, and the largest gay community in the UK. The result of which is a huge recreational drug market. It's the favoured place to live in the UK for first division criminals.

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 biggest qualification to be a good police officer is to have a high degree of emotional intelligence.

There's a difference between what I call a dumb ghost and a smart ghost. The smart ghost is Hamlet's father - you know, he says, "Get revenge, my son!" That's incredibly rare. It's much more the grey lady in the same place everyday, moving across the floor.