Every one of my books is written from the viewpoint of cops, with the exception of my book Killer on the Road, which is written from the viewpoint of a serial killer.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I write crime novels and thrillers - I'm a big fan of cops. You can never forget that they run towards what everyone else runs away from.
Writing books that people want to read is helpful - my most successful book is my only police procedural, a very popular subgenre of the very popular crime fiction genre.
I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one.
I'm very critical of crime novels that use gratuitous violence to shock readers when it isn't necessary. If that's all you have to offer as a writer, perhaps you're in the wrong job.
There is a very conservative element of crime writers that don't recognise what I do is crime fiction.
All my novels are about the ambiguities that lie beneath the sharp edges of the law.
When I started writing the third book, 'The Kill,' the intention was just to write a thriller, a crime novel for myself, really, in which there would be no body, no solution - where you would look at an event from different people's perspectives.
My books are never about the crimes. They are about how the characters react to the crimes.
I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.
In everything I've written, the crime has always just been an occasion to write about other things. I don't have a picture of myself as writing crime novels. I like fairly strong narratives, but it's a way of getting a plot moving.