Quote

Crime writers adore islands. We love the sense of being trapped within a community apart, where normal codes of behavior, if not ignored, can be allowed to slip.

There is no bigger crime, in the English comic novel, than thinking you are right.

In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.

First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.

All novels are about crime. You'd be hard pressed to find any novel that does not have an element of crime. I don't see myself as a crime novelist, but there are crimes in my books. That's the nature of storytelling, if you want to reflect the real world.

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.

There's almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot.

I abhor crime novels in which the main character can behave however he or she pleases, or do things that normal people do not do, without those actions having social consequences.

With crime fiction, you have to write a half-dozen before they catch on.

I couldn't ever write a straight crime novel: there'd be an intrusion of weirdness at some point.