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I know you shouldn't spit in your own soup but I think most crime writing is like TV and doesn't make enormous demands on one's intellect.

I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one.

A crime is like a crack in reality, and it is the author's role to explore those cracks. As a writer, I like to see how they impinge on people.

We haven't had crime writers, and for a long time in the Republic, we didn't seem to have a crime problem as such.

Writing a book is not a crime.

When I'm writing, I don't read much crime at all - you don't want to get distracted by other people's plots.

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

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

There is a very conservative element of crime writers that don't recognise what I do is crime fiction.

I suppose most crime writing is urban. There's not a lot... certainly not in Australia, people don't often set books in the countryside.