Police do get obsessed with solving crimes. You know, particularly if there's been a murder, it becomes personal for the police officer very quickly, and it gets to the family. Even after they've retired, they carry on, not letting go.

Brighton is a beautiful seaside city, but it's got a dark underbelly.

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

Most good police officers are very open-minded. The bad ones are the ones who are close-minded.

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.

I never actually wanted to write horror, oddly enough. It was a kind of misnomer, because I didn't ever actually write horror in the sense of the genre known for it. It was more a type of pigeon-holing in bookshops.

If you talk to any cop, however hardened, and say, "Has anything that's ever bothered you", they'll tell you about the death of a child that they had to deal with.