To this day, I've never figured out a single locked-room mystery.

One of the hopes we have when we hear or read an interview with a mystery writer is to get inside the writer's head, to learn something we didn't know before.

It was really in the Golden Age, between the two world wars, when the pure detective story - of which the locked room mystery is really the ultimate form - became popular.

A lot of locked-room mysteries take time for you to pay attention and see the setup. They aren't thrillers, and they don't move along. The modern mystery story is really faster-paced, and I think modern readers tend to prefer seeing something happening on every other page.

I don't believe in ghosts and have never seen one. I wish I could see one, and I would like to have seen one because then I could believe in God. If I can see it, feel it and taste it, then I believe in it.

Big cities do evoke a sense of menace.