Elizabeth Debicki

I am very tall, and when you're a teenager, you want to be like everyone else. I used to slump a lot; it's very human at that stage to want to be part of the crowd and not want any part of you that is sticking out.

For John le Carre, it was always who's betraying who: the hall-of-mirrors kind of thing. When you go back to the '30s, it's a case of good vs. evil, and no kidding. When I have a hero who believes France and Britain are on the right side, a reader is not going to question that.

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.