WHATBOOK..?

. ..are you reading now?

SHOUT!: The True Story Of The Beatles, by Philip Norman, which has been revised with some fabulous new material.

...would you take to a desert island?

I’D GO for the complete Sherlock Holmes stories. It was having those stories read to me as a child that made me want to write crime fiction and they still stand up today.

. ..first gave you the reading bug?

I READ Jaws and The Godfather one summer when I was 14. These were very different books from those I had been made to read at school and I was knocked for six by the sheer power of the storytelling.

. ..left you cold?

I TEND towards the darker end of the crime spectrum, so anything overly cosy, involving cats, leaves me . . . lukewarm.