Stalin was experimenting with telepathy in the 1930's. Winston Churchill had a paranormal office, trying to get people to travel out of their bodies and see behind enemy lines in the Second World War. And the Pentagon... The X-Files is based on a real department in the Pentagon, that's still there now. Pretty much every government, probably as far back in time as we can go, has one. And the police will quite often - and when I say often, I mean often - they will go to mediums if all else fails in the enquiry.

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

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?"

Women are afraid of walking at night, that someone pulls them into an alley and rapes them. That almost never happens. I mean, 98% of people who are raped, are raped by somebody they know. Somebody goes too far. But the destruction is just the same.

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.

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.