Bella Freud

I've always been interested in justice. I think what is happening to the Palestinians represents the ultimate injustice. I also hate bullies and the effect of them, the way people side with them out of fear. The Israelis are the schoolyard bullies, with England and the United States siding with them.

Mysteries include so many things: the noir novel, espionage novel, private eye novels, thrillers, police procedurals. But the pure detective story is where there's a detective and a criminal who's committed a murder and leaves clues for the detective and the careful reader to find.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.