I get asked to read new works a lot, in the hope that I will give a quotation and I will only give a 'puff' for a book I truly love.
Almost every officer is going to put their life on the line at some point in their career.
My day starts with Radio 4's Today live or 'listen again' wherever I am in the world, thanks to digital radio - I even have an app on my iPhone that receives it.
I think that Brighton, for a crime writer, is almost like a character.
There's a really classic cliche every time you switch the TV on - you see cops arguing. I have spent a day a week for many years in the presence of police and I have never seen them argue. It's a military hierarchy. They do what they're told. There's no bickering.
Most good police officers are very open-minded. The bad ones are the ones who are close-minded.
Stalin was experimenting with telepathy in the 1930's. Winston Churchill had a paranormal office, trying to get people to travel out of their bodies and see behind enemy lines in the Second World War. And the Pentagon... The X-Files is based on a real department in the Pentagon, that's still there now. Pretty much every government, probably as far back in time as we can go, has one. And the police will quite often - and when I say often, I mean often - they will go to mediums if all else fails in the enquiry.
There's a difference between what I call a dumb ghost and a smart ghost. The smart ghost is Hamlet's father - you know, he says, "Get revenge, my son!" That's incredibly rare. It's much more the grey lady in the same place everyday, moving across the floor.
There's no question that ghosts exist. The big question for me is whether ghosts are simply electronic imprints left in the walls or the atmosphere of places, or whether they do actually represent something from the afterlife.
I never actually wanted to write horror, oddly enough. It was a kind of misnomer, because I didn't ever actually write horror in the sense of the genre known for it. It was more a type of pigeon-holing in bookshops.
I've always been much more scared of the living than I am of the dead.
If you and I took a walk down a shopping street in Jo'burg or Cape Town or London, we see two guys looking in a shop window, we think, "Oh, they're wondering what they're going to buy." A cop looks at them and thinks, "Why are they standing there? Are they doing a drug deal? Are they going to mug someone? Are they going to rob the shop?"
I guess a lot of police keep their sanity by developing black humour.
There are an awful lot of readers who won't pick up a book if they think it's got anything horrific in it, or paranormal or whatever.
Obviously I don't have whatever it is you need to be a successful writer.
The biggest qualification to be a good police officer is to have a high degree of emotional intelligence.
Every profession has its own culture, but the police look at the world differently to everybody else. I call it a 'healthy culture of suspicion'.
