PETER JAMES

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.

Almost every officer is going to put their life on the line at some point in their career.

I think the police are a major part of the glue that holds civilised life together. They're not highly paid.

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.

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.

There are people who can achieve huge success in life, while adding a bit of fun and a splash of colour to this increasingly grey world.

Music is an important part of my writing process.

I travel abroad constantly on book promotion and research, and the Internet is invaluable to me for accessing U.K. news in places such as America, which most of the time hasn't heard of England.

The police feel that most of the public are against them and that there is a lot of bad feeling.

Branson ate his salad, and left the rest of his fish untouched, while Grace tucked into his steak and kidney pudding with relish. 'I read a while ago,' he told Branson, 'that the French drink more red wine than the English but live longer. The Japanese eat more fish than the English but drink less wine and live longer. The Germans eat more red meat than the English, and drink more beer and they live longer too. You know the moral of this story? 'No' 'It's not what you eat or drink - it's speaking English that kills you.

The world is changing and people don't like change.

What Brighton's got is a major sea port on either side, good for importing drugs, great for exporting cash, stolen cars, stolen antiques. It's got the largest number of antique shops in the UK, so it's a great place to fence stolen goods. It's got tremendous communication: you've got the sea ports, you've got the channel tunnel, you've got Gatwick Airport 25 minutes away, and London's 50 minutes away by train. So all these escape routes... Which is what villains like.

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?"

We're full of electricity, and the walls and floor of a building contain carbon - the same makeup as a video tape - and I think we give off a huge amount of energy. Some people are able to see that and pick that up. I think almost every person I've met in my life has had some sort of experience that they can't explain, and those fascinate me.

If you talk to any cop, however hardened, and say, "Has anything that's ever bothered you", they'll tell you about the death of a child that they had to deal with.

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'.

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.

Every novel starts with a theme, and I am constantly looking for big ideas.

Police do get obsessed with solving crimes. You know, particularly if there's been a murder, it becomes personal for the police officer very quickly, and it gets to the family. Even after they've retired, they carry on, not letting go.

I've always been much more scared of the living than I am of the dead.

Life's not some slot machine in an arcade with a sign that flashes up saying 'I'm sorry, you have been killed. Would you like another go?' But we might get put through the same test each time, get faced with the same situations until we've learned how to cope.

Women are afraid of walking at night, that someone pulls them into an alley and rapes them. That almost never happens. I mean, 98% of people who are raped, are raped by somebody they know. Somebody goes too far. But the destruction is just the same.

I like dogs. Dogs don't judge people.

Brighton has two universities. It's got a massive young, middle-class community, and the largest gay community in the UK. The result of which is a huge recreational drug market. It's the favoured place to live in the UK for first division criminals.

The crime genre's always been regarded very well by the literary end of the book world, whereas horror, although it had that spell in the late eighties, by and large, it's sort of ghetto-ized, and considered to be exploited literature.