I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

If you have a craftsman's command of the language and basic writing techniques you'll be able to write - as long as you know what you want to say.

Ideally, I like to integrate the human issues into the suspense story itself.

I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block.

I've always written, all my life, and when I was very young I developed an interest in poetry.

I write pretty much anywhere - on planes, in hotel rooms, anywhere in my house.

I was editor of my high school literary magazine and a reporter for the school newspaper.

I spend eight months outlining and researching the novel before I begin to write a single word of the prose.

But one does not make living writing poetry unless you're a professor, and one frankly doesn't get a lot of girls as a poet.

I liked the challenge of writing in a very concise structure in which both meaning and form are important.

In other words, the people who populate my books are more than caricatures.

I also try very hard to create characters - both heroes and villains - with psychological depth.

Hardcover books are fairly expensive these days and to read one requires a significant commitment of time in our busy society. So I want to make sure that when readers buy one of my books they get something they're familiar with.

Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.

Certainly going back to Sherlock Holmes we have a tradition of forensic science featured in detective stories.