Nobody has ever written as many enjoyable, fun-to-read crime novels as Agatha Christie. It's all about the storytelling and the pleasure of the reader. She doesn't want to be deep or highbrow.

My father, whose hobby was collecting secondhand cricket books, came back from a book fair one day with a copy of 'The Body In The Library.'

Agatha Christie never wrote books that just started with a dead body, and a 'Let's find out who the murderer is', which is kind of mysterious but not that mysterious. She always started with, 'How can this thing be happening; isn't it strange?'

I know a lot of crime writers feel very underrated, like they're not taken seriously, and they want to be just thought of as writers rather than ghettoised as crime writers, but I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer.

I'm snobby about books that aren't crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there's no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I'm like, 'Gah, this obviously isn't a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?'

I never write about CIA conspiracies or the FBI or mafia or anything like that because I just don't understand that world. But I think I do understand individual human harmfulness.