One of the hopes we have when we hear or read an interview with a mystery writer is to get inside the writer's head, to learn something we didn't know before.

To this day, I've never figured out a single locked-room mystery.

A lot of locked-room mysteries take time for you to pay attention and see the setup. They aren't thrillers, and they don't move along. The modern mystery story is really faster-paced, and I think modern readers tend to prefer seeing something happening on every other page.

It was really in the Golden Age, between the two world wars, when the pure detective story - of which the locked room mystery is really the ultimate form - became popular.

So if I'm inside your head, don't believe what you might have read, you'll see what I might have said, to hear it. Come waste your time with me.

Big cities do evoke a sense of menace.