What Brighton's got is a major sea port on either side, good for importing drugs, great for exporting cash, stolen cars, stolen antiques. It's got the largest number of antique shops in the UK, so it's a great place to fence stolen goods. It's got tremendous communication: you've got the sea ports, you've got the channel tunnel, you've got Gatwick Airport 25 minutes away, and London's 50 minutes away by train. So all these escape routes... Which is what villains like.

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

My day starts with Radio 4's Today live or 'listen again' wherever I am in the world, thanks to digital radio - I even have an app on my iPhone that receives it.

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 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.

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

Music is an important part of my writing process.