Although just a crime novelist I believe I share thoughts and ambitions no different from other novelists, and work in much the same way. A novelist creates a work of the imagination. Many novels are written in the realist mode, reflecting the world in which both writer and reader live. Even so, no matter how normal or familiar the setting of a novel might seem to a reader – with recognizable place names, for example, or remembered dates, historical events, perhaps even famous public figures – it is none the less a fantasy, a creation of the mind. Everything is made up.

It is made up because a novelist works in a state of mental and imaginative openness, of inventiveness, replacing the world of known facts with fabricated details, many of which might look as if they are the same, or almost the same, as those which are known. An historical personage in a novel – for instance a film star, or an important politician – is not the real figure known to history, but an imagined construct put to use by the writer. A fictional reconstruction of a war, a setting in a great or historical building, a famous love affair, a string of murders, remain fictitious for all their seeming accuracy to what is known.

The absolute familiarity of the world is for many writers too rigid, too well populated with knowledge, and in many cases is uninteresting because mundane.

There are degrees of this, as in all things. No generalization includes every novel. Some authors do treat reality as a literal matter, relying on it as an authentication of their world view. Others take flight on wings of fancy, dreaming of the fantastic, the magical.

For a writer of crime novels, or thrillers, the curse of reality is present in much of the genre, but most awkwardly in the fact of law enforcement.

The classic crime novel reveals the template that is the problem.

Suppose the body of a devious, adulterous and wealthy man is found in the conservatory of his large house. His son, alienated from his father because of an ill-chosen marriage and mounting gambling debts, finds the body. Three of his siblings have been at war with each other for years. A will has been lost or disputed. An ex-wife appears, not the mother of the gambling son. A secretary has just been fired, but still holds keys to certain mysterious rooms. The servants are divided between loyalty and self interest. Why does the son not call the police?