A chap’s impending death has a way of focusing the mind.


The scraps of information she’d gathered knocked against each other, like balls in a pinball machine in one of the arcades on the front. Secrets drew her in every time – the unsaid.

You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!.

In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it.

Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!

When you think about the period in which Agatha Christie's crime novels were written, they are actually quite edgy for the time.

An eerie atmosphere leeched from the soot-damaged walls. It was as if the house had died, and yet she felt she belonged here. It was as if the old place wanted to claim her from the grave.

There was something unbearable about the damp, dark earth closing over a coffin and the still, empty flesh that was inside. She had attended a hundred funerals, but when you really loved someone there was something too final about a burial. Something brutal.

Google maps are one thing but there's no substitute for pounding the beat and I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to break into the back of the houses on Belgrave Place. Once I even for followed by a suspicious householder - I'd been hanging around staring at the exterior of his flat for too long.