Tana French

I remember reading about the Marie Celeste when I was a kid and becoming obsessed with what happened.

I'd always been fascinated by archaeology; it was my original career plan as a kid.

I'm slightly in awe of writers, such as Sophie Hannah, who follow outlines.

With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite.

I've been fascinated by mysteries for as long as I can remember. Real, fictional, solved, unsolved, I don't care; they all fascinate me. I think that's a core human trait.

Most animals are pragmatic about mysteries: If they run across something they don't understand, all they care about is whether it's edible and whether it's dangerous. Humans, on the other hand, are drawn to the mystery for its own sake.

I'm always looking for the potential mystery in everything; I can't imagine writing about anything else.

Your character is always right. No real person thinks they're being stupid or misguided or bigoted or evil or just plain wrong - so your characters can't, either.

Don't be scared of 'said.' Writers sometimes go looking for alternatives because they worry that 'he said' and 'she said' will feel repetitive if they're used all the time, but I swear, they won't.

I read one book where the characters never said anything; instead, they spent all their time grunting and bleating and hissing and cooing and growling and chirping and... It was like a menagerie in there. After a while, I wasn't even taking in the rest of the book, because that was all I could see: the dialogue tags.

In TV writing, Armando Iannucci's satire 'The Thick of It' is brilliant - equal parts hysterically funny, terrifyingly believable, and Oh-my-God-I-can't-believe-he-actually-said-that - and it's got the most satisfyingly creative insults ever.

I reread a lot. I must have read 'The Once and Future King,' 'Watership Down' and Mary Renault's 'Theseus' books at least a dozen times each.

In terms of pure volume, I probably read more psychological mystery and historical true crime than anything else.

Everybody has ways in which they've been lucky in life, and everybody also has ways in which they've definitely rolled snake eyes.

I had a pretty happy, loved childhood.

I don't really plan ahead very far. I have never known what I'm doing more than a few pages ahead.

If you're too lucky, it can be very easy to lack the ability to believe that other people's lived experience is real when it doesn't match up with yours.

For me, a relationship with a place is very fundamental. When you're moving - when you're leaving your life and the place where you've lived on a semi-regular basis - you tend to connect the sense of your entire life to that place that you've left.

I've always seen places as being very deeply connected to the experience that people have in those places. I think that probably comes through very much in my books.

I love writing. I feel ridiculously lucky that this is what I get to do all day.

We moved around a lot when I was kid. I'd lived in three continents before I was 12.

It's OK to screw up. For me, this was the big revelation when I was writing my first book, 'In the Woods': I could get it wrong as many times as I needed to.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

I like books like 'The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher,' where the investigation of a crime becomes a way into an exploration of the society where the crime took place.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.