In an interview on Writing a Great Thriller

What have your book choices got in common?

These are all thrillers I wish I’d written and they’ve all had good film adaptations made. In these cases the book and the movie enhance each other. I think when you write thrillers you always think how good it would be to have the book made into a film.

So, The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett.

You can’t think of Sam Spade without thinking of Humphrey Bogart. In this one you’ve got an interesting central character, Sam Spade, who’s bitter and sardonic and plays each side off against the other. In some ways he’s the archetypal flawed detective, later popularized by Raymond Chandler. I don’t know if Hammett did it first, but he did redefine a lot of the conventions of the hard-boiled genre. There is never a clear statement, for example, on Spade’s morality, on whether he’s good or bad. His partner dies and it turns out he’s having an affair with his wife. He sends a woman to jail when he could have saved her. The Maltese falcon itself is this artefact covered in jewels that has been painted black to disguise it, but it’s a complete McGuffin! It doesn’t actually matter at all, except to provide motivation for the characters. I’ve used this device in my new book about the illicit trade in antiquities – I’ve used an ivory mask that really was found in London and had been dug up in Italy.

So an inanimate object providing motivation for the human drama is handy in thriller writing?

Yes. I mean, think of Pulp Fiction. We never do find out what’s in the bloody briefcase. You could say it’s a cop-out, but it’s no more of a cop-out than your best friend dying and having to find out who the murderer is. You need something to get the story in motion. My artefact isn’t actually fictitious. I think if there is real life in the book you can in some ways educate the reader and get them thinking: ‘I never knew that!’ I think Dan Brown’s books are often like a lecture embedded in a chase story.

In an interview on San Francisco Novels

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett is another thrilling story. Tell us about this classic work of detective fiction, published in 1930, and what we can learn about the emerging urban culture of the time by reading it.

The Modern Library named The Maltese Falcon one of the top 100 novels of the century. It was the first, and probably the greatest, hard-boiled detective novel. It pretty much invented the genre and its archetypes, including the femme fatale and the hard-drinking detective – in this case Sam Spade. Hammett created a prototype that’s been followed ever since.

Hammett never tells you what the characters are thinking. He describes what they’re saying and what they’re doing, but he never tells you what’s on anyone’s mind. So you’re somewhat in the fog yourself as you read it. I love it because it gives you a sense of what the city was like in 1930. You can see the fog-blurred neon. You really feel that you are back in that time and place. San Francisco is very much a noir city.

There are three film adaptations of The Maltese Falcon. You have noted, “If the movies are our modern mythology, San Francisco can lay claim to a sizeable chunk of Olympus.” What makes the city so cinematic?

It’s a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of colours and vistas. Because of the fog, it never appears quite the same way twice. In Vertigo, Hitchcock used a fog filter, because fog is the most unpredictable of props. It’s one of those great cities of the world that is identifiable by any of its streets.