Sarah Pinborough

“Never trust a narrator whose opening gambit is to insist he's not mad.”

“The unreliable narrator is an odd concept. The way I see it, we're all unreliable narrators of our lives who usually have absolute trust in our self-told stories. Any truth is, after all, just a matter of perspective.”

“The strange thing about living somewhere for a couple of years and then moving on and not returning is that those locations become ghosts of themselves in your mind.”

“I know it's dangerous to say you want to do something different with a genre because people always take that as an insult to the genre.”

“There are stories and history everywhere in London.”

“I don't mind a narrator who's self-deceiving, but the clues for their truth have to be there for the reader to see.”

“I'm a lot less travelled as an adult than I was as a child, but I think living in far flung places gives you a perspective on the world and people that adds flavour to your writing.”

“My first six books were horror, I think because when I was young I loved Stephen King. John Wyndham, Daphne Du Maurier, and it's natural to try and emulate the books you first loved.”

“I have written in a lot of genres, that's true, and I'm not sure it's always served my career well.”

“I would quite like to become a mainstream thriller writer, obviously, because I enjoy writing those stories, and it is the best way to secure your career.”

“Anybody's life is probably a mess of secrets and lies when you boil it right down.”

“I hate it when it is all about the twist and when the ending comes out of nowhere. I think you should be surprised and shocked, but you should also think, 'Damn, I should have seen it,' because there are clues all the way through.”

“I'm not a natural researcher, and I don't get bogged down in it, but I think if you get it right in the first half, people will forgive you, and then you can move on with the story.”

“It would appear that I just love writing many different stories.”

“The Thames Torso murders almost fell into my lap. After deciding to use a real historical crime as the focus for the book, I went to Google and searched for unsolved murders in Victorian London, and they basically popped out at me about halfway down the first results page.”