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.

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'.

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.

Sophie Hannah Quotes