I have been writing since I was at school, short stories and poems. I was brought up on Conan Doyle and PG Wodehouse. and I had a burning desire to write stories in the style of these two, and my prose was very purple. I’d always had a book on the go, but never finished anything.

I started writing seriously when I was working in the City. I used to have a shed to disappear into, after seeing my family after work. I wrote a black comedy about life in the City. It was a form of escapism. I gave up my job eventually with the idea of a career in writing and did an MA in creative writing in Sheffield, under novelist Lesley Glaister I have been writing full-time since 1995, but not published until 2000.

One of the reasons I turned to writing crime was because I came across American writers like George Pelecanos, Dennis LeHane and James Ellroy. I loved their grittiness. I set my books in London because I could write about the best bits about the city I love while looking at fields of sheep, because by this time we were living in the Peak District in Derbyshire.

I worked on the character of Staffe for three years. The first book in a series is incredibly important, because you have to establish a template in which the character is potentially deep enough to support a whole series. Staffe occupies two thirds of each page of the book.

I’ve signed up for three books with Faber, having just delivered the third to them. There are going to be another two at least. The more books I write the more loose endings I create. It’s rather like the long-ranging, story-boarding of a soap. You want to give your readers as big a pay-off as possible; it’s almost like going from level to level in a computer game.

I’m simply not happy unless I’m writing. My university work co-incides with what I do as a writer. Part of my function is to contribute to the University’s research output. The novel-writing and research counts towards. It. I write very quickly and my University work kind of slows me down. I’m writing a book a year, and I’ve established a rhythm. My writing shed is now my little flat in Liverpool, so I get up at 5,30 and the first two hours of every day sitting in bed writing on my laptop.

Reading is very important to me. I like putting myself in other people’s heads. I mimic styles in my writing so have to be careful what I’m reading. I try to read around my subject area, Fred Vargos, the Swedish crime-writers and I love the language of American crime.

The most pleasurable reading experience I’ve ever had was reading Billy Liar – for me it’s the peak of what every writer hopes to achieve. I can’t ever imagine writing anything which had so much effect on my readers.

I remember Whitby as a special, magical place. There are all sorts of literary texts attached to the place.. I was asked by Radio 4 to look at out of copyright characters, and I thought about The Bride of Frankenstein. It was later in 2005 that I thought I wanted to write a series about this Bride of Frankenstein with a collection of ghoulish friends.

I was doing a reading at Whitby to do a reading at the library and my Mam came, and she said afterwards, ‘Brenda’s your Nanna’. And then is something in that. There’s a lot of my Nanna in Brenda. The friendships Brenda has are very like the relationships my big Nanna had.

The domestic life of these characters has to be cosy; the reader has to be there with them and enjoying their adventures. I’ve often found Brenda fans have done an impromptu tour of Whitby looking for Cod Almighty, the Christmas Hotel etc. In the same way I’ve given many library reading group talks and I’ve come across lots of women who have never read fantasy or sci-fi but who seemed to have fallen in love with the characters of Brenda and Effie, and love the fact that it’s an ongoing series. My next Brenda book is coming out in autumn, The Bride that Time Forgot.

‘Strange Boy’ was a book I wished that had been written for me when I was ten. It was about possibility of being different, whatever that might be. ‘The Diary of A Dr Who Addict’ is a spiritual continuation of that. It’s the book where I’ve written the most about teaching myself to write.

There are lots of books I can mention that influenced me, I read ‘Carries’s War by Nina Bawden in my first year at high school, and Dracula in my first days at college, when other folk were in the bar.