India, Sept. 27 -- 1Given your constant output, from books and podcasts to television projects and now the Netflix adaptation of Thursday Murder Club, how do you juggle it all? When I'm a reader, if I am reading a series that I love, I don't want to wait two or three years for the next book. So, I write a book a year. With the film, I literally did not get involved for one second. The film is someone else's vision of the Thursday Murder Club, which is lovely. But I like to work hard, and want readers to find a new adventure for the Thursday Murder Club or We Solve Murders every year. That feels like the least I can do. 2Do you face any writerly struggles, since each book in the series has been about 400 pages long? There's only one real struggle and that's going upstairs and actually starting. It's like going to the gym. The hardest bit is always putting your trainers on and actually going. Once you're at the gym, you've got to stay there for an hour or you're going to look like an idiot. Writing is exactly the same. I do anything to put it off but once I start, I work for two hours non-stop, with the phone off, no internet, no distractions at all, apart from my cats. And I work as hard as I can, after which my brain screams at me to stop. 3What about the crime genre attracts you as a writer? Are you comfortable being called a genre writer, or do you see genre as a marketing gimmick? Crime as a genre transcends genre because you can tell any story in it. We know there's a murder, and at the end we're going to find out the murderer. Those are the only rules. And even those you can break, but within those, the journey you go on is about the characters you're with and the state of the world or politics or economics as it is at the moment. I find it incredibly freeing knowing that a reader is feeling comfortable, lying in a hammock thinking there's been a murder and it will be solved. So long as they're enjoying the journey, you can take them anywhere. With crime, people don't feel like they're being lectured or reading a State of the Nation book. But I get to write all the same stuff, and double my audience immediately because it makes readers feel comfortable. If I were to write anything else, it would be the same words, but they'd be much less successful. 4You've discovered that an ancestor of yours helped solve a crime... I went on a TV show where they trace your ancestors and, around 1820, an ancestor who was a fisherman in Brighton, England, with his wife and his mother, essentially solved a crime. The guy who did it, the murderer, was hanged. My great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was in court. And there were newspaper articles from the time about the three of them walking five miles across the hills of Brighton to uncover this grave and then find the man who committed the murder. It was an amazing story, and I knew nothing about it. It was spooky how similar they were to the Thursday Murder Club....