SIMON TOYNE

All writers steal. You might as well steal from the best.

As a television producer, you do a lot of writing - drafting proposals for pilot shows and other things, so yes, a good deal of writing was involved.

I hate it when characters know things but only reveal them when it's convenient to the story. I'd never do that. That's cheating.

I knew from my television work that I could sit down and put words on paper but didn't know if I had the talent to tell a story in novel form.

I love researching all sorts of weird stuff. I always say, 'God help me if the FBI came across my Internet search history.'

I love that I can work from home and take my kids to school every day.

I love Westerns. They're a unique creation of American mythology.

I wrote 'The Searcher' because I love westerns, and they've fallen out of fashion.

The largest two books I've ever read more than once are 'Bleak House' by Charles Dickens and 'The Stand' by Stephen King, about 1,200 pages each.

We can make a concerted effort to stop poisoning the planet: that would be a good way of appeasing the gods.

When I set out to write 'Sanctus,' all I wanted to do was craft a piece of high quality entertainment.

As a writer, I always try as hard as possible to get out of the way of the story, so maybe that's the most important thing my readers should know - I'm all about the story, not about the ego.

Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling.

I figured if I write a modern thriller but spliced in the DNA of a classic western - the drifter who comes into town with secrets - I could do something interesting with both genres. Westerns are also an incarnation of the classic knight errant tale, the lone warrior with a moral code, and I love those types of stories.

I looked back at the years since I'd left college and thought of the list of things I'd have liked to do. I'd always wanted to write a book - not a small undertaking. I never felt I had the time or creative energy to spare in order to write one as well as I wanted.

I think 'The Searcher' is a departure from my first because it's less grounded in religion and is far more rooted in the mythic tradition: more of an existential thriller where the main character is actually the central mystery, and his journey is all about trying to figure himself out.

I'm certainly not the first author to tiptoe into the conspiratorial, religious-tinged territory, but - and I hate to break this to the faithful - neither is Dan Brown.

If you do come across 'Sanctus' in a bookshop, please see past the cross on the cover and the sinister outline of a monk and just read the first page and make your own mind up. If it's still not for you, then that's fine; just put it back and walk away.

If you look at the great Westerns, and at Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, they all contain elements in common: a harsh landscape; demons or outlaws trying to stop or kill the protagonist; and there are mythical legends at their core, innate in all cultures.

If you look back to the earliest religions, before they got organized and started building churches and amassing wealth, they all sprang from the same place - they were inspired by nature.

If, after five years, I hadn't had anything published, I was just going to forget it and go back to TV full-time until I retired or they put me out to pasture.

It is easy to be inspired by history when you're living in a part of it and allow that to seep into your writing: having said that, a minimalist room with no distractions is often better; the most exciting visions should already be in your head.

It's interesting to note that when something like a virus tries to poison us, the first thing our bodies do is heat up. We burn away the infection. Maybe that's what Earth is doing to us.

My family and I live in a wing of a Georgian mansion in East Sussex, which was built in the 1780s and fell into disrepair. It was rescued in the Seventies and carved into six terrace houses.

One of the things that made me try writing novels was I could take time off to be with the kids. That's the practical side of what I love about the writing life.