Life's not some slot machine in an arcade with a sign that flashes up saying 'I'm sorry, you have been killed. Would you like another go?' But we might get put through the same test each time, get faced with the same situations until we've learned how to cope.

I guess a lot of police keep their sanity by developing black humour.

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.

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

I think the police are a major part of the glue that holds civilised life together. They're not highly paid.

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