Sara Sheridan

History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

This is the cusp of an age at least as exciting and as brimful of potential as the early days of the printing press.

The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.

You've got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows it's a novel, they know someone's made it up and they know it's not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.

One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.

The law don__ like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.

The smell of tobacco usually reminded Mirabelle of being a child _ coming downstairs in the morning when the dinner party her parents had hosted the night before was cleared away, but the scent of cigars still lingered.

I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.

I didn__ want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank.

People see what they expect to see.

Sometimes a person__ first assumption was very telling. It revealed how they perceived the situation.

New technologies and resources offer exciting opportunities. They democratise access to information.

The sky was a sparkling succession of black diamonds on black velvet made crystal clear by the blackout.

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.

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.

In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into.

A chap__ impending death has a way of focusing the mind._