I absolutely adore classic crime and read a huge amount as a teen - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Sherlock Holmes, Josephine Tey, and many more.
I found the success of 'In a Dark, Dark Wood' really distracting when I was writing 'The Woman in Cabin 10,' but in a way, the fact that 'Cabin 10' was doing well felt quite freeing while I was writing 'The Lying Game.'
One of my desert island books, 'The Leopard' is not so much a novel as a eulogy for a way of life and a Sicily that was already lost by the time Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing.
I'm not 100% sure 'Rebecca' qualifies as a thriller, given it's three parts screwed-up love story and two parts ghost-story-without-a-ghost, but the mystery at the heart of the novel is what happened to Maxim's first wife, the eponymous Rebecca, and it's unravelled with the pacing and finesse of the finest psychological thrillers out there.
I write unreliable narrators because - paradoxically - they're the most honest, true-to-life kind there is.
I write as if I'm someone reading the book - often people ask if I write one strand first and then go back and seed in the other, but I don't think I could keep track of who knows what, and the tension would come out wrong, so the answer is no - I write it more or less in the order you read it.
We are unreliable narrators - all of us.
