There is something a little bit weird about writing a crime novel. If, for instance, you were to commit a crime in real life (please don’t), that would be the only role you play. Everything else would be done by someone else – the investigating, the impact of the action and so on.

Yet when you are writing a crime novel, you have to play all of the roles at once. You have to inveigle yourself into the mind of the antagonist to set up and execute the crime around which the novel centres. You have to see things from the point of view of the investigating protagonist(s) to work out how they solve the crime, the steps they take along the way and the challenges they face. You have to put yourself in the shoes of the people around the victim, portraying the impact of the crime and what it does to people.

It can be an immensely satisfying role to play as a writer, creating a puzzle and then picking your way through it to solve it. But there is no denying that it is also a challenge. Seeing things from the point of view of multiple people always is, and it is made that much more challenging in crime fiction when issues of motivation and morality come into play.

It means that the crime author has to be able to inhabit a range of different parts, and be comfortable going to many different areas of the psyche. Whereas in real life, we tend to only see crime from one point of view – our own, whichever role we play in the scheme of things – in crime fiction, we are everyone’s point of view.

It’s a difficult rope to walk at times, but when it all starts to come together and the puzzle starts to make sense, it definitely makes it all worth it.