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" All through childhood, I wrote verses and mysteries. There is, for me, one connection: structure. My poetry is metrical, rhyming. "

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" Reading is the only area of my life in which I prefer to be non-autonomous. "

" 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?' "

" Some writers, I'm told, look for their characters' surnames in telephone directories. I don't - it seems too obvious. Or too deliberate: if you go looking for names, you're bound to find them, of course, but I've always had a superstitious hunch that the names you find by accident are always going to be better and more satisfying somehow. "

" Try as I might, Agatha Christie is unique. The actual writing style can't be exactly the same, so instead of trying to replicate it exactly, the way I got around it was by inventing a new narrator. "

" Most crime fiction plots are not ambitious enough for me. I want something really labyrinthine with clues and puzzles that will reward careful attention. "

" Crime fiction is a way of satisfying that nosy need to know. "

" A lot of women feel like they should be enjoying motherhood, they should be fulfilled and shouldn't be thinking, 'I wish I didn't have to do this.' "

" In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11. "

" My favourite Friday treat is to drive out of the centre of Cambridge, where we live, and go for a swim at the health club I've just joined out in the countryside at Quy. It's a lovely pool, inside a converted barn. Usually it's just me and a couple of other swimmers there. "

" Poirot is a classic character from fiction, not a MacBook Air; he would not benefit from updates. "

" For me, a big part of writing psychological thrillers is choosing crimes committed for motives which would only apply to a particular person in a particular situation; a unique, one-off motive that is born out of someone's particular range of psychological afflictions. "

" When I set out to write crime fiction, I didn't think to myself, 'I'm going to model myself on Agatha Christie' or 'I am going to be a crime writer in the Christie tradition'. "

" If we knew more about psychology, we would be better equipped to deal with other people's psychological damage which they might project onto us. "

" When my children were very young, I was slated to go on a business trip. When it was nearly canceled, I decided I wouldn't tell anyone and go off for a week's vacation anyway. In the end, the trip went off as planned. But I was intrigued by the idea of an illicit holiday. "

" The crimes in my books are committed by people who can't keep it together any more. They do something to express their own pain, and that has a terrible effect on somebody else. "

" Cambridge is heaven, I am convinced it is the nicest place in the world to live. As you walk round, most people look incredibly bright, as if they are probably off to win a Nobel prize. "

" My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak. "

" 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?' "

" What surprised me most while writing 'The Monogram Murders' was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it. "

" The brilliant thing about swimming is that, while you're doing it, there's nothing else you could be getting on with, like the ironing or sorting out the children. My mind goes into free-float mode; some of the best ideas for plots come into my head while I'm ploughing up and down the pool. "

" I always notice the dysfunctional dynamic of human relationships because most places where you encounter it, people are trying to pretend it isn't happening. "

" No one has been buried at Mill Road Cemetery in Cambridge, England, for many years, and so the place has a shady, overgrown magic about 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. "

" I am trying to write novels for properly clever people, but I also want them to be proper novels that also stick in a person's mind and have an atmosphere about them. "

" I love the house we're in, but at the same time, I'm hooked on the romance of house-hunting. "

" Everything is personal - the poems and the crime novels. I have never been involved in any murders, but there are strong autobiographical elements in each. "

" I've got lots of favourite authors, but I would say Nicci French because I look more forward to reading her next new book than any other author. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" My characters all have issues, but I don't see that as weird or abnormal because I think in real life there are very few bland, normal people. "