A nice piece from Malaysia

It always fascinates me to see how the field in which I write — I hate the word ‘genre’ — is taken much more seriously outside the UK and to an extent, the US, where we are largely seen as the manufacturer of potboilers by the literary media. Back in April, on a whistlestop tour around Asia, I spent just a day in Kuala Lumpur. A fascinating one too, talking to a succession of writers and journalists who turned up to interview me incredibly well-briefed and full of interesting questions (some of them about books I’d almost forgotten writing).

You can see the quality of the journalism in this piece by Christy Yoong that’s just appeared in the Star. How often do the UK papers devote that much space to popular fiction? Well, there you go. Thanks for the piece and the great questions, Christy. I’m not sure I actually invented the term ‘whydunit’ (or did I?) but it certainly explains my approach to things.