His latest novel is Siege.

Are you a bookgeek?

I like my books, and read as much as I can, but I’ve never thought that I was a geek about it, but then, maybe I am. I couldn’t live without them.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

Write something every day, even if it’s just a few lines. And, yes, when I’m working on a book, which is most of the year, I do follow that advice as closely as I can.

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

Crikey, there are hundreds, but those who’ve been the most influence would almost certainly include Lawrence Block, Agatha Christie, Dennis Lehane and JRR Tolkien.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?

Both, I suppose. On the one hand, I try to reach people who enjoy a fast-moving story, which I’m hoping is most of us, but at the same time, I wouldn’t write anything that I didn’t think I’d enjoy.

Where do you write, and why?

I can write anywhere but tend to do it in my office at home. It’s in one of the spare bedrooms with a nice view of a big oak tree out the front, and it’s proved to be a comfortable place to write.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

There’s more than one. Every time I read a really brilliant book (particularly a crime thriller), I end up wishing I’d written it myself. I particularly admire great twists and, for that reason, it would probably be The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.

Siege takes place over a very brief time frame, and almost demands to be read in a single sitting. How hard do you find it to step away from the laptop when writing something so pacey?

Well, the thing is, even writing a short, action-packed scene can take the best part of a day, so it’s easier to step away than you might think. Also, the first draft of any of my books is never anywhere near as pacy as the finished article, so a lot of the faster scenes are inserted afterwards. Siege was an exhausting write and, though I largely enjoyed doing it, I used to look forward to finishing for the day.

Like many writers, your route to publication was a long and painful one. What’s been the most rewarding thing about life as published author?

Getting an agent. It was the first time anyone had ever expressed any professional interest in anything I’d written after years of standard letter rejections. I remember being unbelievably excited and truly chuffed. Even getting my first book deal didn’t trump that.

You’ve been bouncing ideas around for your next book on your website in recent months. Can you tell us any more about it now?

Sadly not. I’m still fighting with two or three ideas. I thought I had the book I wanted but in the last few hours, I’ve had second thoughts. That often happens about this stage, although I’m hoping to be writing something within the next week.

A lot of the antagonists in Siege are ex-Forces guys who seem to have fallen through the cracks on their return to civilian life. Have you any thoughts on how the military could better prepare troops for life back home?

Before I read Siege, I saw several TV programmes about soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and undergoing some real hard times when they left the army. I think it’s more up to the government to help veterans when they return to civilian life. They could do this by providing apprenticeships, improved access to public sector jobs and educational courses on the one hand, and ready access to counseling and welfare payments on the other, so that veterans don’t feel like they’re no longer wanted. Also, I think all of us should show pride in the commitment and bravery of our armed forces, who do an extremely tough job for comparatively little financial reward.

Knowing what you know from your research about the criminal underworld and the steps taken to fight it, do you find it easier or tougher to sleep at night?

Tougher. In my experience, criminals by and large don’t fear the British justice system, and as a result, it doesn’t act as anything like the deterrent it should.

Additional questions by Mike Stafford. Photo credit: Johnny Ring.

Despite a variety of jobs (including – once – catching chickens; (briefly) hatching chickens; (even more briefly) carrying heavy things so that joiners could nail them together; delivering the mails; conducting omnibuses, back in the days when such things as conductors walked the earth; and being a dogsbody and factotum in local radio), he eventually succumbed to the inevitable and became a teacher. In West Lothian. He did it for over twenty years before he began to long for incarceration like Ezra Pound.

Even more ironically, when he left teaching, and after wondering briefly whether chickens had not truly been his metier, he went into Psychiatric nursing. He’s fond of replying to the question of why he left teaching by answering that Fate had the psychiatric ward marked down for him. If he hadn’t left teaching, he’d have gone there as a patient.

He is very married, and has been since 1972. He has one daughter and two grand daughters.  He is now writing a book about his teaching career. The masterpiece on chickens (and the hatching, not to mention catching of them) is on the back burner for the present.

Are you a bookgeek?

To my eternal shame, I knew nothing about the website until The Locked Ward was reviewed on it. I am, however, a book geek in the more general application of the term and will follow Bookgeeks from now on.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

That writing is all about re-writing and yes, I do follow it. I used to tell kids, as an English teacher, that they had to revise their work and re-write where necessary. As a writer, I think that not only is redrafting a necessary piece of work, it’s the part of it I enjoy best. My first draft is to get basic ideas down. Then I redraft and overhaul as much as is necessary to get the text the way I think it should be.

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

Difficult. I admire many writers. But which ones actually inspire me? Joyce and Flaubert, for their dedication to the art of prose writing and their determination to find the ‘mot juste’, the one, exact way of verbalising the idea. Jeanette Winterson, for her unique gift of style. Dickens and Flann O’Brien for their humour. And, over and above everyone else, like the sun that allows other writers to live, William Shakespeare. The greatest writer that ever lived.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?

I never write for myself. That’s self-indulgence, in my view. The audience I have in mind depends on what I’m writing. My detective novels are aimed at people who’ve read and enjoyed the hard-boiled American classics of Chandler and Hammett – and who will realise that mine are a gentle and affectionate spoof. My novel Wyndford, set in a shale mining village in 1946, is aimed at those who enjoy literary fiction with a tragic element to the central love story – and anyone interested in feminism. My central character is a 19 year old girl, not any of the miners. And The Locked Ward was written for an audience interested in mental health and aspects of modern care but with no specialist knowledge.

Where do you write, and why?

I have a study full of books and my PC. I write there. It’s the place for it.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

Any of: Ulysses, Othello, At Swim Two Birds, Bleak House, The Passion, The Sense of an Ending – oh, and many more. A little known work of genius – The Cone-Gatherers, by Robin Jenkins. Set in a pine forest in Scotland during the Second World War, it burns itself into the memory. Lyrical and tragic. A stunning novel.

A lot of your epigrams are from Shakespeare. How do you think his take on mental health has held up over the centuries?

Shakespeare had such an insight into the human condition that many of his portrayals still ring true. Look at Othello’s jealousy, Iago’s corrosive envy, the way Macbeth’s psyche is tortured by his guilt, Lear’s madness and plenty other examples. He observed how the mind worked all right; he just didn’t have the psychiatric knowledge that has come in subsequent centuries. But – he had basic human understanding. For example, in Macbeth, Malcom tells Macduff: “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.”

According to your blog, you’ve recently finished working on a novel. Is there anything you’d like to tell us about it?

I’ve written several! I Am the Egg Man is set in the 60s and is basically a rites of passage novel, but with one or two unique twists; Redemption is set in the slave trading days in Jamaica; Reptiles is the love story of two keepers in Edinburgh Zoo, set in the G8 days of 2005, Wyndford is a tragic love story and there are three ‘entertainments’ featuring my Bathgate private eye, Jack McCracken, all with Shakespearean titles!

In The Locked Ward, you mention you felt good about contributing something positive by working as a psychiatric orderly, but why were you drawn to that line of work as opposed to any other branch of care?

I’d done it as a vacation job when I was a student, back in the days of the Jacobite Rebellion, and liked it so much that, when I stopped teaching, I knew immediately that I wanted to go back to psychie nursing and do it again.

What advice would you give to young people considering a career in psychiatric nursing?

I don’t know if I would presume to give anyone advice. But I tried always to remember that a patient was not an aggregation of symptoms, but an individual human being.

How do you think we as a society could improve our approach to mental illness?

That’s for cleverer folk than me. But again, I think if we see the patients as individuals, rather than ‘cases’; and if we remember that people with mental illness are just as liable to be generous, mean, outgoing, withdrawn, cowardly, brave – or any other attribute – as other people, we’ll be on the right path at least.

Additional questions by Mike Stafford

In both senses, yes, I will admit it. I get a lot of great recommendations from the website and love trawling the reviews and finding new authors. As a child, thought, I wasn’t much of a reader, so have had to become increasingly bookish as time has passed. Perhaps I haven’t even reached the ‘geek’ stage yet, but I’m preparing well.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

I think the one piece of writing advice that really struck home was when a couple of writers were giving a talk long before I was published and an audience member asked how they had become writers. The answer was along the lines of this:

‘When we were students, all our friends wanted to be writers, the only difference between them and us now is that we kept at it and somewhere along the line, they put their pens down.’ I took from this that as a writer, that’s all you can do, keep at it, and one day, if you’re fortunate and keep trying, someone will show an interest. So simple advice to a writer – if you keep writing, you are a writer.

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

All of them! In truth, I never read a book without gaining something and being moved, touched, inspired, disappointed or enraged by some part of it. Even if I haven’t particularly enjoyed a book, it will inspire me to try something different in my own writing, even if it didn’t quite come off in the book I read, you can often see what the aim was. About individual writers, it’s the long running authors who keep producing great and interesting work, such as Lee Child, who are very inspiring. I always go back to classics by people like Thomas Harris as his works resonate still. I will re-read ‘ Red Dragon’ if I want to be reminded how effortless and brilliant a good thriller can look. I’m re-reading Othello at the moment and you can often find the greatest models of good and evil and most inspiring writing in the classics.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?

I am my own audience, of course, and try to write a story I would enjoy reading. Then, when I’ve read and re-read something and I’m no longer sure if it works, I’ll try to imagine how someone else will react to it. But although I might not be writing for a specific audience, I’m always thinking of how someone without knowledge of the plot would respond to a scene. It’s hard to put yourself in that position but it helps. That said, I also write because there is an audience out there and somehow, I’m working towards their enjoyment of the book, though it may not be explicit all the time.

Where do you write, and why?

I write in the living room of our flat. It’s a busy place with my children doing their thing, people watching TV or ironing in the background, but I can concentrate most of the time. Intricate plotting needs early mornings, though. I try to write each day, either before work or late in the evening. I’ll take the second half of the question to be – why do you write rather than why do you write in the living room, if I may! I suppose I write because I always have and when I’m actually writing rather than dreading it or worrying about it, it’s the best feeling in the world (almost). I’m most at home when my mind and fingers are in the thick of a great story and the rest of the real world disappears for a short time. It’s very liberating, but when you put the pen down, getting going again can be hard so it’s best not to stop at all.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

Difficult question. I couldn’t enjoy reading a book I had written because the joy of reading is very different from the joy of writing. If it was my own work, I’d completely ruin all the love and passion I have for many a great book. That said, I do admire ‘Anna Karenina’ by Leo Tolstoy. I read it at an impressionable age and it provided a paternalistic wisdom and the comfort of a long narrative. Since I first read it in my late teens, I think about it often, about Levin and Kitty, of course, much more than Anna and Vronsky. Something about the structure, the characters and that particular story keeps living on in my head. I’ve only read it in translation, though, but I would love to have write an English ‘Anna Karenina’, had I the talent or the time, or indeed, both.

Bad guys are often the most enjoyable characters to write, but those in 88 Killer far exceed the realm of standard villainy. Were they still fun to write, or was it more laborious?

Difficult choice, between fun or laborious. I do like to write the bad guys and I like to understand their psychology. Reading about abnormal psychological conditions is fascinating. Seeing the limits of the human psyche is also very exciting and interesting, but I kind of agree that this particular villain had too much connection to real events in history and to real current problems to enjoy in any way. I find the kind of violence displayed that is not triggered by emotional problems or the lack of empathy, but by some ideology most difficult to understand. It was one of the reasons I wrote the book, as an exploration of political violence. So I wouldn’t say fun or laborious, I’d say it was challenging, difficult and sometimes draining but these aren’t negative things to me.

You used a proxy researcher to give your descriptions of New York greater authenticity. Are there any key things writers should look for in a proxy, or is the onus solely on them to ask the right questions?

I think that you need a good relationship with anyone who is carrying out research. A good researcher will understand what you will want to use the information for and therefore will try to work with your eyes to a degree. Quite often, I am asking open questions and I just want to get a vague sense of things or an area so that I can work more on it myself. At other times, I want something accurate and precise. I think that for the latter type of research it is easier to get answers. I remember reading something about James Joyce who was writing in Switzerland and wanted to know how long it took to get from one part of Dublin to another. He called someone and made them walk the route and count the steps – that’s great but I don’t need that level of verisimilitude. I often want mood or atmosphere. I want to feel my way into a scene and therefore you need to find someone who can look at things in the way that allows you to see them. I will often want photographs and telling detail so that I can piece together the scene and pick out what I want.

You’re currently working on the third Harper and Levene book. Can you tell us anything about it?

I can say that Tom Harper faces another very tough challenge and that Denise Levene comes into her own, although, it’s not an easy ride for either of them. The killer is particularly psychotic and I’m pretty scared whenever I’m writing those scenes. I won’t reveal plot yet as it’s too early to say, but I’m enjoying it and it’s going well.

American culture and the American psyche are famously inward looking. As an English writer writing about America, what insights do you have that may have passed Americans by?

I’m not sure that I am writing about America. I set my books in America but I feel that I’m writing about themes that aren’t particular to a single country. That said, the American setting gives me the distance I need to write about the difficult aspects of life and death, or fear and pain. I was particularly fascinated with American detective fiction when I was younger and I wanted to write in that genre, so the books are sometimes a reaction to those fictions I enjoyed. I think that the difference between the American and English psyche is worth exploring but I wouldn’t say that I have particular insights into America. I hope I have insights into human relationships and character but that’s the reader’s judgement.

Is Nazi ideology bound to endure as long as there is ignorance and inequality, or do you think decent people are capable of one day eradicating it, and if so, how?

I would say that it certainly will be eradicated as the vast majority of human beings do not believe in violence of hatred. Violence and hatred are not part of what people see as the good life and the life worth living. I do believe that mankind does make some progress through time and that we are better at expressing universal values than ever before. That does not mean that ignorance or hatred will not surface again in a different guise. It will, but what was so pervasive about Nazi ideology was that it attacked people for simply being who or what they were. It’s still an utterly shocking concept. But somehow, the shock of this was not felt and it was rationalised and humanised. Will human beings always provide reasons for the bad things they do or want to do? Yes, they will, but let’s hope that systematic, industrial and nationalised hatred is far harder to sustain than it once was. I’d also say that it is clear that the vast majority of humanity do not find the expression of hatred acceptable in any way. We have to remind ourselves that goodness always has the balance of numbers.

Additional questions by Mike Stafford.

Book Heaven

As a young adult, I loved the Victorian writer, G. A. Henty, with his rampaging historicals, told from the eye of the storm – tales that are still vividly in mind after all these years. As a young man, Hermann Hesse took my imagination, for his intelligence and sheer range, especially in his four best books, Saiddarha, Steppenwolf, Narziss and Goldmund and The Glass Bead Game. I regularly re-read all four. Each one improves each time.

Of late (in my fifties), I’ve read and re-read the wonderful Patrick O’Brian, never thinking it possible I could be seduced by sea stories, but O’Brien’s a great novelist and Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin two of the greatest creations in literature. I also love the sense of oceans opening up to the reader. I mean, nineteen big books!

Book Hell

For me it has to be contemporary mainstream fiction – McEwen, Rushdie, Amis and Barnes particularly. Such thin, emaciated stuff and so much “good writing” – i.e. style. I guess I’m a barbarian, but I hate such exercises in style. I want depth and character and a good page-turning story. Oh, and a world to explore, not the prison of middle class male angst. The single book I’d most hate to be stranded with? Midnight’s Children. I’ve never yet got beyond ‘The Tear In The Sheet’, a mere sixty-off pages in!

Are you a bookgeek?

Not especially I’m afraid – I don’t read hardbacks (too heavy; take up too much shelf space); I’m not interested in first editions, and I don’t treat books with any great reverence – I no longer scruple to turn down a corner. Having said that, I haven’t yet managed to read a book electronically, and perhaps never will. I do love going into my local independent bookshop and buying a stack of titles I haven’t heard of, and there are particular shelves set aside for the books I really love – my sets of Patrick O’Brien, Peter O’Donnell and Cornell Woolrich, to name but three.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

I don’t think anyone’s ever given me any, personally, but I remember Elmore Leonard (I think it was) saying, ‘cut out all the adverbs’, which I try and observe. I used to be a sub-editor, which helps, too.

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

There are so many – JG Farrell, Haruki Murakami, Elizabeth Strout, EM Forster, Barry Lopez, E Annie Proulx, F Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Jhumpa Lahiri, LP Hartley, Patrick O’Brien… (Initials seem to help)

Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?

I can’t imagine doing anything other than writing what I most hope to read, although, as an untraceable Dutch poet once wrote, “My words are the corpses of my thoughts” – that’s usually how I feel at the end of it all. And if anyone knows who said that, please tell me!

Where do you write, and why?

I have a tiny office about 6’ square, so I have to get out regularly. Why do I write there? Because it’s my office!

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

That varies from day to day. Today I’ll say The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. As clever as it’s provocative as it is utterly romantic.

You’ve spoken before of your love of film noir, and the arc of Ray’s character is certainly very noir.  Does he owe much to your cinematic leanings, or does the inspiration for him come from elsewhere?

Ray is very much inspired by my love of noir, both in films and novels – to pick out just two favourite films: “Chinatown” and “In a Lonely Place”.  The whole idea of a private detective came from my obsession with ‘Chinatown’. I suspect he’s also informed by a deeply ingrained love of Cornell Woolrich’s ‘Black’ series and by early James Ellroy. All of the above seem to nail that tension between deep romantic yearning and an almost operatic sense of desolation. But of course your characters are always, more than anything, informed by your own experience, and this is certainly true in Ray’s case (which is not quite the same as saying he’s autobiographical!)

A lot of writers tend to write protagonists of the same gender as themselves, but in The Invisible Ones, both the leading characters are male.  What made you decide to buck the trend?

I know this may sound disingenuous, but I didn’t ‘decide’ as such. The story arrived, and it was Ray’s story, and then it became JJ’s story too, so I had no choice but to tell it from their points of view. And in my view, gender isn’t a particularly important distinction – we’re all human beings…

The blood motif looms large in The Invisible Ones, but beyond that, blood also provides one of the most significant clues to solving the mystery.  Were you concerned about giving the game away?

Yes, but not especially for that reason. I was concerned about treading the line between parsing out too much information and too little, but that’s just part of the job – the heavy lifting part.

Your work manages to walk a line between high-brow literary fiction and crowd-pleasing crime.  How do you feel about the tension that often seems to exist between the two?

There isn’t really tension between them in my mind, and in general I think that the distinction between ‘high-brow’ and genre is made less and less – at the time of writing we have a thriller on the Booker shortlist, which is great for everyone. Having said that, I suspect that my next book may not look quite so much like a thriller from the outside. I love the strong narrative pull of the thriller structure, but the trade off, in my opinion, is that it’s very difficult not to make the solution an emotional anticlimax.

As we’ve seen of late, anti-gypsy sentiment seems to be among the most enduring of prejudices.  Having done so much research into their way of life, what’s your take on why this is?

It is, and this year has been interesting with so much media coverage – most of it unhelpful and unrepresentative. I think the prejudice endures precisely because they are usually less visibly distinct than most ethnic minorities. There is a tendency to say that Gypsies are not an ethnic minority (they are) and/or that people are not ‘real’ Gypsies, which is then used as an excuse for ill-treatment. Another important reason for continuing prejudice is that the travelling way of life has been rendered practically illegal by successive governments, so they have little or no legislative shelter unless they are prepared to forfeit that part of their culture.

Additional questions by Mike Stafford.

We asked him about his life as a writer and his recent book Saints of New York.

Are you a bookgeek?

Utterly and completely, even to the point of finding first edition hardbacks, first printing paperbacks, old versions, new versions, every version possible of a book I love. For example, there are three books I can think of right now – In Cold Blood by Capote, The Shipping News by Annie Proulx and Crazy Heart by Thomas Cobb – where I have at least five or six versions of each title. I will go out of my way to track down unusual copies on eBay or book websites so I have complete collections. That is one of my sadder traits. I will also get complete works’ collections together for authors such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Paul Auster, James M. Cain, Chandler etc. I am the same with recording artistes that I love as well. That is the magpie in me. The books and the vinyls are my ‘shiny things’. From a more cerebral perspective, I tend to keep quotes in my mind, always. There are certain comments, certain aphorisms and phrases from books and author interviews that I forever remember, and I repeat them as and when necessary. So yes, without doubt, I am a complete geek when it comes to books.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

The best piece of writing advice is as follows: ‘The very worst book you could write is the book that you feel others will enjoy. The very best book you could write is the book you yourself believe you would enjoy.’ I don’t know where it came from, but yes, I try my best to apply it. I feel, without being critical, that there are a great deal of authors, certainly in the crime fiction genre, who write books against a proven formula and methodology. I have pursued a different tack, in all honesty, and I always have done. Commercial success has never been a concern for me. I just wanted to write the best stories I could, and my areas of interest dominate my novels. I don’t think I will ever set a book in the UK, and I will never write a series. Those are two ‘laws’ for British crime fiction writers that I have flaunted and violated with abandon. I pay the price, of course, by being a lot less commercially successful than many of the established UK crime fiction writers, but I was at a festival once with a British best-selling crime writer, who – having just read the first chapter of his new novel to the audience, and then answered questions about it – said to me, ‘Jesus, if I have to read that shit out one more time I will go insane…’ I kind of got the idea he was happy with the success but very unhappy with the material he was having to write! I never want to be in that frame of mind. The joy of writing is first and foremost for me, and if that goes, then what’s the point?

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

There are many. I make it my business to seek out and read the work of writers who make me feel like a bad writer! Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Mailer, DeLillo, Capote, Chandler, and on and on and on. There are endless brilliant writers. I read books on a whim. I give up on a book quite easily these days as there are so many truly wonderful books and so many that do not really snatch my attention. I find myself reading books and caring less about the plot and storyline than the writing and the dialogue. Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself? I write for myself, of course, but I do have a single reader in mind. This is someone who reads across genres, someone who is interested more in a great story than anything else, someone who wants to read a book and get completely lost in it. Someone who gets to the end of a book and has been so emotionally engaged by the thing that they actually miss the characters like they would miss friends. In all honesty, I always picture my perfect reader as female. Why, I don’t know, but I do. She’s also brunette. She sometimes wears glasses. Go figure.

Where do you write, and why?

Now I am fortunate enough to actually have a room to work in. Okay, so it is crowded with books and CDs and vinyls and tape cassettes, with guitars and stacks of amplifiers, and toolboxes piled against the wall full of soldering irons and guitar pickups and Lord knows what else, but it is a small sanctuary away from the world where I can shut the door and get completely lost in what I am creating. My son is away to school, my wife is at work, the house is utterly silent, and I can just write and write and write. And when I am done writing I play the guitar far too loud for a man my age, and then I make dinner for the family. That is what I do when I am not on tour.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. Flash answer, no hesitation, no doubt. A classic, which – by my own definition – is a book that presents you with a narrative so compelling you cannot read it fast enough, and yet is written so beautifully you cannot read it slowly enough. You are caught in a limbo. You really want to find out what happens, but you never want it to end.

Many struggling authors take heart from your perseverance and eventual success. What sustained you in the face of such scepticism from publishers?

A firm belief that it could be done. Note, I say a firm belief that it could be done, not that I could do it, but that it could be done. A quote from Disraeli: ‘Success is entirely dependent upon constancy of purpose’. That, and the definite idea that I didn’t really want to get to the end of my life and think, ‘Hell, what if I had just tried a bit harder…’

In Saints of New York, you take traditions which have been pounded past the point of cliché, and breathe new life into them. What’s your take on how you manage this?

For me, as I have said so many times, it is about the emotion of the thing. The first thing I decide when I embark upon a new book is ‘What emotions do I want to create in the reader?’ or ‘When someone has finished this book and they think about it some weeks later, what do I want them to remember…what emotion do I want them to feel when they recall reading the book?’ That’s key for me. Those are the books that stay with me, and those are the books I am constantly trying to write. There are a million books that are brilliantly written, but mechanically so. They are very clever, there are great plot twists, and a brilliant denouement, but if the reader is asked three weeks after reading the book what they thought of it they might have difficulty remembering it. Why? Because it was all very objective. There was no subjective involvement. The characters weren’t very real, they didn’t experience real situations, or they didn’t react to them the way ordinary people react. It was more of a mental exercise, a puzzle-solving exercise, than a real emotional rollercoaster. In fact, some of the greatest books ever published, the ones that are now rightfully regarded as classics, are those books that have a very simple storyline, but a very rich and powerful emotional pull. It’s the emotion that makes them memorable, and it’s the emotion that makes them special. Character is everything for me, so a book should be filled with the blood of the character, at least figuratively speaking! In writing this book it changed along the way, as all my books do, and they change because the characters become that much more real, and thus they actually begin to inform and influence the direction of the story. I don’t want that to sound pretentious, you know, but I am always working against an emotional barometer. If I don’t feel it, then the reader won’t. Personally, I have a major issue with central characters who are always right, who leap to the wildest conclusions about things, and are then proven right. People are not like that at all. They make mistakes constantly, and investigators and police are the same.

In your work, you’re keen to analyse the human condition and human relationships, and in Saints you do this in depth through tormented cop Frank Parrish. Do you think there is more to be learned about life from tortured souls like Frank than from people or characters who, conversely, actually enjoy an idyllic existence?

Does anyone enjoy an idyllic existence? I’ve never met anyone who does. I think we all have shadows. We all have areas of darkness. Irrespective of the face that we might wear for the world, there are always things about which we are unhappy or discontented. Isn’t life really nothing more than the game of solving problems that prevent us from attaining happiness? There’s an old adage about ‘Show me a contented man, and I’ll show you someone who may as well be dead.’ Something like that. I think the business of life is recognising what you have and valuing it, but always being aware that there are things left unaccomplished, new challenges, new games to play. Contentment is a close cousin to apathy, and that is something I never want to feel.

You have an immense fascination with the US. Given its current position in the world and its outlook for the future, what type of America do you think you’ll be writing about over the next few decades?

I think I will be writing about the same America. America is America. America is a brash youth with an eager enthusiasm to get involved where it does not belong. It is a schoolyard bully who perceives itself as knowing all, and yet secretly knows that it has assumed things and made a lot of mistakes, and yet is somehow incapable of feeling embarrassment or shame. That is, of course, a comment on the administration, not the citizens. American citizens are no different than us. We as British people have a terrible history too, and the things we have done for King or Queen and Empire are outrageous. We have learned, to some small degree, and we have tried to take responsibility for what we have done. We never can do, not really, but we pretend to ourselves that we have. America has yet to reach the point where they stop and say, ‘Hang on, what are we doing here, and why?’ I think America will keep on doing what it has always done, and thus will provide me with an endless wealth of material.

What can you tell us about your next book, Bad Signs (out October 2011)?

Bad Signs is a mid-1960s road movie of a novel. The central characters are teenagers on the run from the juvenile detention system. They are wanted for a series of murders they did not  commit. It is a book about love, friendship, betrayal, mistaken identity, family, fraternity, and it has a good deal of violence. It is a book I am very proud of, and I am excited to see what people make of it. In France they call my novels, ‘slow-motion thrillers’, and I love that expression. Bad Signs, prose-wise, is perhaps closer to A Quiet Belief in Angels, but it is much, much faster-paced. I really hope that people like it!

Additional questions by Mike Stafford

Are you a bookgeek?

Totally. I’m the person whose Facebook status on a Saturday night might read “Louise Penny’s new book is out. Wahoo!” Or I jump in a cab downtown and say, “Take me to the closest bookstore. And step on it, will ya?”

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

A few years ago a friend of mine told me that she would read my stuff if I’d just write like I talked − what I was giving her to read didn’t feel authentic. I thought this was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. I mean, clearly she was clueless about the process. You will find that this is the initial reaction most writers have to suggestions regarding their writing. We may smile and nod our heads but really we’re thinking what a dumbass. Later, the wisdom begins to sink in. I was reading Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series when it hit me that she might not be a complete idiot. The dialogue, the rhythm of it, was so real. I could hear Hawk and Spenser joking around. Writing real is harder than it sounds. You have to be brave. You can’t be self conscious. You have to just let it fly. It means reaching down deep for an honest voice. Regardless of the subject or the character, you want to find that authentic voice. It was an incredibly simple piece of advice and surprisingly difficult to accomplish. For me it took some growing up, aging a little; I’m not saying how much aging except that I’m working hard to get this whole series written before I fossilize completely. I think I need a nap right now.

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

Pat Conroy makes my knees weak. Seriously. This guy could write the telephone directory in a way that would make me want to lick it. First of all, he loves food and writing about food. And he has this amazing ability to pull you into a place. Doesn’t matter if you’ve never experienced South Carolina. Read Conroy and you’ll know the spiky palmettos and the salt air and the way the kitchens smell in genteel Charleston. Big crush on Conroy. We’ve never met but I’m sure I would be reduced to a babbling idiot. He’s kind of my rock star.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?

Both, really. I mean, you have to keep in mind that you are writing for an audience so as not to allow yourself to just spew out opinions or wind up writing technical manuals because you’re so impressed by your own research. Sure, I keep the reader in mind. I want them to be entertained. I don’t want to ask too much of their patience. But I also try to write in a way that feels truthful and organic. I want the characters to stay in character, likeable or not, flawed or not. I’m sure anyone who writes for the public has walked this tightrope. I’m actually amazed when writers say they just write for themselves. For me, that would be a journal or something. And who wants to read that?

Where do you write, and why?

I have a room at the back of my house that I converted into an office when I moved in. It was an old mud room with really dark paneling and funky, fake-brick sheet vinyl on the floor. Okay, so it still has funky, fake-brick sheet vinyl but I’ve painted the room a very light color. Three of the walls have windows. It looks out onto my backyard and beyond that there are seven acres of pine trees and oaks and maples and ivy running wild and blackberry vines. That’s why I work there. I forget I’m in the city. It’s rare to have this kind of green space and it’s gorgeous. Right now, as I’m chatting to you, all I can hear are birds chirping and the constant, almost electric hum of cicadas. Everything is so lush and green at this time of year – it just takes my breath away. Occasionally, a car flies through the neighborhood and intrudes on my little fantasy world. Or a plane flies over. I’m that person on the street with dogs and cats who yells at traffic when people are speeding. I don’t like the speeders. So that doesn’t look f-ing crazy at all, right? I’m sure my neighbors are convinced the weird writer-hermit with cats all over the porch is just a heartbeat away from wandering around pushing a grocery cart and muttering obscenities.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

Um . . . errr. Ok that’s just not fair. I really wish I had written every book that ever shocked me or made me cry or sold a bazillion copies or made me laugh out loud. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. The Russia House. The Prince Of Tides. Monster. The Silence Of The Lambs. Postmortem. The Body Farm. Seven Up. The Parsifal Mosaic. The Tiger’s Wife. Cat And Mouse.

Keye Street is a Chinese-American woman in a genre traditionally dominated by white men. Was there an attempt on your part to redress the balance of the genre, or were gender and ethnicity purely incidental?

Well, Keye was born before the story or any of the supporting cast. The killer came next and the title, but that’s another question, isn’t it? My brother adopted my niece Anna as an infant from China and took her home to his place in the textile mill region of the North Georgia Mountains. By the time this gorgeous Asian child was four years old she had a deeply Southern accent. I started to think about what it would be like to grow up in the American South looking different from the neighbors while also being a fully fledged Southerner. That’s when Keye Street came to me. I was on the way home from their house over the winter holidays one year and I pulled to the side of the road and wrote the first lines of the book. I was actually concerned about my chances of getting published with a wise-cracking, recovering alcoholic, doughnut-eating Chinese-American PI. I really had no idea how this would play out. And I didn’t start out to do anything but tell Keye’s story. To my delight, all kinds of people seem to find something familiar or likeable in Keye. I think it’s because she’s really screwed up. I mean, we’re all a little damaged and flawed, right? Most of us strive to be decent humans. We fail sometimes. So does Keye. She has stunning lapses. But we forgive her because she tries. One of my favorite quotes of all time is from May Sarton who said something like, “One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being.” Keye gets this and she wants to come up higher. But she doesn’t always manage it.

You write with an evident fondness for Atlanta, but you’re also forced to have it as the setting for some fairly gruesome deeds. How do you manage to square the two?

(Laughing) I’m not sure forced is the correct word here. More like my two favorite things; Atlanta and murder. What’s not to love? And it’s so hot here today that just stepping outside gets your blood boiling a little. Atlanta is something like a beautiful midlife mistress in the midst of a hot flush – alluring and dangerous.

Judging by the advance reviews of Stranger (our own Mike Stafford’s included), you succeeded in throwing readers well and truly off the scent of the ending. Was this particularly important to you, or were you more concerned with establishing character, capturing place, etc?

Establishing character is hugely important and something that’s easy for me. I have Keye’s voice in my head. And a lot of other voices in my head too. I’m sure it will take years of therapy to work that out. And the American South, well, I’m as Southern as fried green tomatoes so, again, setting and place isn’t something I have to work at. But creating a mystery, now that’s a challenge. Readers are smart, increasingly sophisticated and hard as hell to throw off. It’s a big thrill for mystery and crime lovers to get fooled. I pity the writer who disappoints a mystery reader in the Internet age. You will find yourself well skewered on readers’ sites all over the world and your inbox full of descriptions of exactly where they would like you to put your book.

We’ve racked our brains and can’t think of another writer who marries such procedural accuracy with the work of a private investigator. Which writers in the genre do you look to for inspiration?

It’s so nice to hear that. I created Keye’s background in order to free her of some of the restrictions she might have if she were still at the FBI. I tried to learn something about how police departments might approach an investigation so that when she’s freelancing as a consultant, we can see through her eyes how the police work. For me it’s a win, win – combining a police procedural with a private detective opens up so many new and largely uncharted avenues. I love Jonathan Kellerman’s methodical and brilliant consultant Alex Delaware and his relationship with the police. And Patricia Cornwell’s super uptight, massively serious Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta. Janet Evanovich’s total mess of a laugh-out-loud bounty hunter Stephanie Plum. And Robert B. Parker’s PI Spenser. I suppose if you put all of them in a blender, something close to Keye Street might pop out.

For authenticity, you consult regularly with professionals from across the law enforcement spectrum. In your experience, how much of crime fighting is locking horns with masterminds, and how much is tracking down run-of-the-mill crooks?

Most criminals are just thugs and most crime is about opportunity: scam artists; rapists; people on the fringe looking for an open window or door or a computer set down at the coffee shop, a set of keys dropped, a credit card. But even the guys that evade law enforcement for years seem surprisingly ordinary – the guy next door. That’s always the interview you see, isn’t it? Some bewildered neighbor saying, “He was such a nice, quiet man” while the backyard’s being dug up in the background.

Additional questions by Mike Stafford

Are you a bookgeek?

Yes, absolutely. I live in a small house stuffed full of books, including a loft and two sheds. I can’t go into a bookstore without buying something. The book-review section is the first part of the newspaper I go to. I don’t like e-readers and what they might mean for the future. I worry that book-jacket art will go the way of LP cover art. I worry that books will disappear. Digitalcontentgeek doesn’t have quite the same ring as bookgeek, does it?

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

Frank O’Connor’s advice to writers was, “Glue your arse to the seat.” And that’s about it really. No other writing advice counts for anything if you can’t do this. Faffing around with research, thinking about what you’re going to do, talking about it, blogging, walks on the beach – none of this is writing. Do I follow O’Connor’s advice? I try, but most of the time it’s pretty hard. If it’s not working, there’s always Beckett’s exhortation, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

The big one has to be Thomas Pynchon. There are passages in Gravity’s Rainbow that seem miraculous to me, for their intricacy and beauty. I try to picture him in his little Manhattan Beach apartment in the late sixties, early seventies, scratching out those sentences on his graph paper, with no Arpanet connection, and wonder, how did he do it? My other usual suspects include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Flann O’Brien and J.G Ballard.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?

Neither really. I don’t think about it like that. For me writing tends to be a technical struggle at the quantum level, a struggle to get words hitting up against each other the right way, then stringing together in sentences the right way, and then those sentences sitting together in paragraphs the right way. There’s a certain inevitability, or inescapeability, to the way, and what, one writes, almost like the colour of your hair. There’s always the dye bottle, of course, but that’s never a good idea.

Where do you write, and why?

I have a small study at home, with a big pine table and shelves full of books. I work on a combination of paper and an iMac. With young kids in the house I have trained myself to factor out certain noises, but I do enjoy being interrupted by them – any excuse to procrastinate.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, because it’s so perfectly formed, so intricately structured and layered, and so thematically rich. I re-read it every couple of years and always find myself hoping against hope that this time Gatsby won’t die.

Bloodland is very much a zeitgeist piece.  Were you trying to write a commentary on our times, or was this incidental to the business of writing a thriller?

I certainly didn’t have the words “zeitgeist piece” in my head when I was writing Bloodland – that would have been a class A inhibitor. Clearly, there are contemporary themes and concerns in the book, but these have to arise from the story and the characters, otherwise you’d end up hectoring the reader. But I do think that good crime fiction can provide a perfectly valid commentary on the times, as well as being entertaining.

Having seen The Dark Fields/Limitless brought to the big screen, do you now find yourself writing with an eye on a film adaptation?

No, because I don’t think it works that way. The Dark Fields was a very Hollywood-friendly book, and could be pitched in four words (“Viagra for the brain”) or even three words (“a pharmaceutical Faust”) but that’s just the way it turned out, I didn’t plan it like that. Winterland and Bloodland are much harder to pitch in this way, so if I was deliberately trying to recreate that Hollywood friendliness in these books then I failed miserably. The point is, if you’re thinking about a movie before you’ve even written the book you’ve got it ass backwards. The DNA of modern prose has been hugely influened by a century of cinema-going, and that’s a perfectly natural, organic process, but at the same time writing a novel is a massively complex business that has to be allowed to breathe and transform itself as it goes along. You can’t rein it in as you write it with the a priori requirements of its own screen adaptation.

In Bloodland, Jimmy Gilroy draws parallels between celebrity lifestyles and debt-ridden economies; both lack solid foundations and seem to lurch from disaster to disaster.  However, in the next breath you seem to dismiss this as facile.  Does the comparison have merit, or would you prefer readers to look a little deeper?

I think the bit you’re referring to is an exchange between Jimmy Gilroy and Larry Bolger, in which Gilroy is trying to justify writing a biography of a z-list celebrity by claiming that she is emblematic of the times. It’s then Bolger who dismisses this comparison as fanciful. (Not me, gov). So the exchange is specific to the dramatic requirements of the scene. At the same time, the character of Susie Monaghan is meant to represent, in a general way, the madly consumerist, morally vacuous culture that she was a product of. But the novel is not a polemic. These observations arise, I hope, from the characters and the story, and are not there to serve an agenda.

You discuss in depth a new scramble for Africa, largely as immoral and barbaric as the first (assuming it ever actually ended).  Is the corruption of leaders/rulers over the generations an indictment solely of the ruling classes, or of man in general?

It’s tempting to simplify these matters, but the war in Congo is an incredibly complex affair, involving several surrounding countries and multiple complicating factors. This is very well explained in Jason Stearns recent book Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. One of these factors, however, the scramble for natural resources, seems pretty clear-cut to me, and is the area I choose to focus on in Bloodland. What drives the scramble for resources? Economic demand, cycles of production and, ultimately, profit. Whether it’s extracting rubber to make tyres for the new-fangled bicycle or coltan to make capacitors for cell phones, business is the motor, mass consumption is the justification and profit is the goal. I think, at some level, we’re all indicted in that.

One of the subtexts of Bloodland is the relationship of the West (particularly the US), with China.  Over the next century, do you see Pax Sinica as inevitable?

I don’t know. Using past models you’d probably have to say yes, and but I’m not sure that the next century will comply with any of our past models. There are too many unknowns, both known and unknown. I think it’s all up for grabs.

Additional questions by Mike Stafford

Are you a bookgeek?

I am a total book geek, but am new to the world of Bookgeeks. I look forward to becoming one.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

Always leave some part of your writing unfinished at the end of the day, even if it is just the last few lines of a scene. When you sit down at your desk again, knowing your first writing task is a good way to set up momentum for the work that lies ahead.

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

The writers I admire most are those who have made a good balance between their work and the lives they lead outside the worlds they must create inside their heads. I have watched a lot of young authors burn out because they lose track of the line between those worlds. You must draw on your own life to create the fiction you write, but you can’t become your own fiction and expect to last long in this line of work.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?

I get a lot of emails on the website (inspectorpekkala.com) devoted to the series, and this has given me a glimpse into the kind of people who are reading the books. I suppose I could say that I was writing for them before I even knew who they were, but now that I do now, I have a better sense of who my audience really is.

Where do you write, and why?

I divide my time between the US and the UK. In each of these places, I have little hideaways where I get my writing done. Now, for example, I am up in my cabin in the woods of Maine. The floors have old Navajo rugs on them and the walls are hung with old black and white pictures, snow shoes, my rucksack and a bamboo fishing pole. I write in different places because I do other work besides writing and this sometimes means I have to move around.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

Blood Meridien, by Cormac McCarthy

Kirov outranks Pekkala and is more socially adept, but Pekkala is far more worldly wise. Do you see Kirov as a sidekick figure, or is their relationship one between equals?

They did not begin as equals, but I find as I write (I’m on the 4th book now) that they are becoming that way. Kirov needs Pekkala’s expertise to solve the tasks they are given by Stalin, but Pekkala needs Kirov in order to be able to navigate through the world of Soviet Russia. Kirov is part caretaker, part translator of the past into the present, and part bodyguard. Pekkala’s skills are such that he has been absolved from having to fit in to the world around him. In fact, he has never fitted in and never could. That is why the Tsar chose him to be his personal investigator, because Nicholas II (who also never fitted in, either among his own people or in his role as Tsar) saw a part of himself in Pekkala. The same is true for Stalin, although Pekkala’s relationship with the dictator is more complex and dangerous.

Are there plans to release your books in Russia? And what do you think a Russian audience would make of them?

I believe there are plans to release the books in Russia. I have been both pleased and a little overwhelmed by how many countries have picked up the books for translation. I’ve had a number of emails from Russians. Most of them are very friendly, but I have had a few people quibbling over things as obscure as the colour of boiler suits. On the same day, once, I had someone write to complain that Stalin was not portrayed sympathetically enough and another message from a different person complaining that he had not been portrayed as enough of a monster. My experience from reading Russian history is that there is very little consensus among the Russians themselves about the details of their past. This is, I know, the long term result of a regime which practiced such profound disinformation, not only on the rest of the world but also on its own people, that people continue not to trust what they are told.

Pekkala is a Finn; was it easier for you, writing as an outsider, to have an outsider as your protagonist, or were there other reasons behind Pekkala’s nationality?

It was definitely easier to write from the point of view of an outsider. At the age of 7, I was sent from America, where my parents were living at the time (although they were British), to boarding school in England. I did this for so many years that I ended up feeling like a foreigner in both countries. Although it made life difficult at times, I think it gave me the chance to see two separate cultures in a way that was different from those around me. You reach this point where you just stop trying to fit in. At first, it is frightening, but it’s something you have to do if you want to stay sane. I suppose there is a lot of this in Pekkala. He found, as I did, that by not trying to fit in and to become something you aren’t, you find more acceptance from those around you than you would if you attempted to be one of them. The reason I chose a Finn as a main protagonist is that the Russians have a particular fascination with the Finns. Even though Finland is dwarfed by the vastness of Russia, the Russians have a healthy respect for the Finns, in no small measure due to what the Finns did to the Russians in the Russo-Finnish war of 1940. But it goes deeper than that. In many Russian fairytales, you will find a Finn performing some magic or other. For the Russians, the Finnish culture holds a certain supernatural quality that I found very useful when writing about Pekkala.

There must have been a temptation to paint Stalin as nothing more than a monster, but instead you made him a human being. How did you go about researching his character?

There are a number of fantastic books about Stalin, the best of which were written in the late 1990’s, when the Russians released tons of material which had previously been classified. This opened a window into Soviet culture, and also into the life of Joseph Stalin, that had previously been impossible. Sadly, and yet somehow typical of the ebb and flow of Russian culture, many of those files have now been re-classified as secret. The window has closed. I doubt it will open again in my lifetime.

Several times you mention the will to self-destruction in the Russian psyche. Do you think this is a Russian twist on something universal, or is there something uniquely self-destructive about the Russian national character?

I do think there is something peculiarly self-destructive about Russian culture. One of my old history teachers once said – Nobody defeats the Russians except the Russians. What he meant by this, I think, was that the Russian capacity for violence against its own people is so extraordinary that it becomes difficult for people to grasp. As Stalin himself once said – One death is a tragedy. One million is a statistic. We simply can’t grasp the magnitude of what Russia has endured, at its own hands and at the hands of others. That is what makes it possible.

Additional questions by Mike Stafford

Since I was dangling upside down from the midwife’s fist.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it)?

There’s only one useful piece of writing advice. It comes wearing various masks; sometimes compassionate, sometimes pitiless. But it always boils down to this: if you want to write, just write.

And yeah. I follow it every day.

Which authors do you find most inspiring as a writer?

Patricia Highsmith. Raymond Carver. Grahame Greene. And about ten million others I’ll think of as soon as I’ve posted this interview.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing, or do you just write for yourself?

Well, this is a slightly loaded question because there’s a big difference between a market and an audience. You should never write to a market. It’s contemptuous and always ends in failure because your readers are smarter than you; they can spot a liar a mile away. You have to write the books you’re compelled to write, whether that’s a historical romance, a workplace comedy, a thriller set on a nuclear submarine or a forensic examination of a middle-class marriage in the process of collapse.

But the purpose of writing — all writing — is to be read. It doesn’t matter if it’s an instruction manual or a novel: it needs to be crafted with a reader in mind. Even Joyce was acutely aware of his audience, idealised and confounded as that audience may have been.

A novel written in the name of “self-expression” is usually the opposite — it’s actually a wretched, adolescent attempt to impress the unwilling. Like some domineering bore on the bus, yelling into his phone about what he plans to do tonight.

As if we gave a shit.

Where do you write, and why?

At home. I write pretty much all day, every day. I work half days at the weekends, although that’s a recent habit and I’d like to break it.

I travel a great deal, so I’m also obliged to write in various hotel rooms around the world, but I don’t mind this. Being superstituous about where you write always strikes me as being another of those self-consciously “writerly” affectations. As long as I’ve got a desk, a chair, a laptop and a ready supply of coffee, I’m okay.

Tell us the book you most wish you had written.

It’s enough for me that the books I love exist in the world.

To wish I’d written them sounds a touch egomaniacal.

(Although it’s also a weird form of self-negation: in order to wish you’ve written someone else’s book, you’d also have to wish you were the person it was necessary to be in order to write it. I love Wuthering Heights and Catch-22 , but not enough to wish I were dead.)

Luther: The Calling is a prequel novel. Did you have the plot in mind before writing the TV series, or was it borne out of a desire to better understand the character?

While I was developing the TV show, I did quite a bit of background work into Luther; his relationships, his world. Things I didn’t get the chance to tell as a story. But other than that, not really. I knew the killer was a very bad man, and I knew where he ended up … but I didn’t know how he ended up where he ended up, if you see what I mean. It nearly killed me, I’m immensely proud of the novel that resulted.

Dogs feature heavily in the book, both as victims and aggressors. Was this solely because they were needed to further the plot, or were you deliberately making a point about man’s bestiality to man?

Writers often populate their fictional worlds with superficially disguised portrayals of friends and family. I spend all day alone with two dogs, so that probably accounts for some of it.

Other than that, I’m interested in dogs because their best attributes so closely mirror ours, not least their inexhaustible capacity to love and their absolute loyalty. But their worst characteristics mirror ours, too; any dog is three hungry days from reverting to wolf.

Plus, I just seem to have this thing about dogs. Recently a reader reminded me that Very Bad Things happen to a dog in a previous novel of mine, Always the Sun. I’d completely forgotten about this and would like to take this opportunity to apologize to all dog-kind, all over the world.

Both the series and the book push the envelope in terms of violence. Was this a goal in itself, or was it necessary to add weight to the psychological drama?

Well, a bit of algebra did go into those decisions: the killer’s actions had to be bad enough to merit Luther’s reaction to them. And as I say, I knew where the killer ended up, so ….

But yeah, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a certain joy to be had in terrorizing the reader.

The villains in Luther tend to be human boogeymen, or monsters, but the book and the show are also well-grounded, functioning police procedurals. How do you manage to square the two?

As I write, an entire family has just been butchered in Jersey. Elsewhere on the same day, a father decapitated his disabled son and left the child’s head by the side of a road. To say nothing of last month’s massacre in Oslo.

None of which is an attempt to make the case that Luther depicts the everyday lives of London police officers: the things that happen in Lutherland are absolutely fictional. But the kind of things that happen? They happen all the time. And real police officers have to deal with those real horrors.

That thought fascinates and terrifies me … which is why I’m so compelled to write about it.

You mention in your acknowledgements that Idris Elba “made Luther.” Would it be accurate to say John Luther is now as much Elba’s creation as your own?

The way I see it, we’ve got joint custody.

Additional questions by Mike Stafford. You can find Neil on Facebook.