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'100,000 years old'

18 August 2008

'America suited the book I wanted to write much more than Britain. British crime stories tend to be very internal, psychological, claustrophobic, very limited in terms of geography. If you think about Ian Rankin, it's a small area of Edinburgh. I wanted to do something that was more wide-ranging in terms of geography, empty spaces, distant horizons...

Thrillers are the direct survivor of what must have been the first type of stories told way back whenever it was, the Stone Age or before. We must have told stories about danger and peril and then survival and order to console or encourage ourselves. I think the thriller form is 100,000 years old and the reason people learned to tell stories. Other genres are welcome to ride along.'

Lee Child, British author of number one bestseller Nothing to Lose in the Observer