25 years ago I had published several non-fiction books on architecture, and had also written three fiction novels which had accumulated a pile of publishers’ rejection letters. But I had been bitten by the fiction bug, and decided to try again. This time I turned to crime. It felt like coming home. I discovered that the structure and pace of the crime novel provided a discipline within which my imagination and my prose could flourish. When that first crime novel, The Marx Sisters, was published, first in the UK and then around the world, I found that I was setting out on a journey which has taken over my life.
Here are some thoughts about that life and work: