Becoming a police suspect

‘I gave them the plot of Knots and Crosses, not realising that it was very similar to a case they were investigating. They took me into an interview room, actually turned on a computer, took my details and entered them in the database. I went home and thought "that was a bit odd, they were interviewing me, I thought I was interviewing them" and my dad said "you silly bugger".

The real world is full of wild, outlandish coincidences that we can't use because fiction has to be realistic. There's nothing realistic about the world now, politics-wise, everything-wise. You couldn't make it up - it's a problem for fiction writers.'Ian Rankin, author of Rather be the evil, Knots and Crosses and many other novels, in the Sunday Telegraph.