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The causes of crime are very complicated. But there is a very big literature, as you know, about single parenthood in crime, about race in crime, and about poverty in crime.

Anti-social behaviour still blights lives, wrecks communities and provides a pathway to criminality.

One of the things I learned is that you've got to deal with the underlying social problems if you want to have an impact on crime - that it's not a coincidence that you see the greatest amount of violent crime where you see the greatest amount of social dysfunction.

Crime is sexy.

Crime to many is not crime but simply a way of life. If laws are inconvenient, ignore them, they don't apply to you.

The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct.

I think that crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.

When a crime is committed, only the victim and the victim's close circle experience the event as pain, terror, death. To people hearing or reading about it, crime is a metaphor, a symbol of the ancient battles fought every day: evil versus good, chaos versus order.

Crime takes the pulse of a culture. It tells us the truth about us as a species.