Music is an important part of my writing process.

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

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 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.

We're full of electricity, and the walls and floor of a building contain carbon - the same makeup as a video tape - and I think we give off a huge amount of energy. Some people are able to see that and pick that up. I think almost every person I've met in my life has had some sort of experience that they can't explain, and those fascinate me.

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.

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.