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A good writer can set a thriller anywhere and make it convincing: the trick is to evoke the setting in such a way that it highlights the crime or unsettles the reader.

It's no secret - I love detective fiction. One of the reasons I love being in London is because I like to watch all the shows on TV. I watch them all. I like 'Detective Frost.'

I know a lot of crime writers feel very underrated, like they're not taken seriously, and they want to be just thought of as writers rather than ghettoised as crime writers, but I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer.

I heard David Sedaris read live recently which was a complete delight. Few writers make me laugh out loud on the bus. He does.

It's not often a thriller keeps me wound up as well as 'Headhunters' did. I knew I was being manipulated and didn't care. It was a pleasure to see how well it was being done.

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon,' that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many.

I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.

I read a lot of thrillers, especially American crime novels.

Anybody who sits down to write, and they think 'thriller,' maybe shouldn't be thinking that way. Maybe we should be thinking 'novel,' maybe 'thriller' way in the background, but that these are real people to whom things are happening. It just happens to be a hell of an exciting story.