I remember the phone call: London, 2006. Around 11 p.m., walking out of a football game on a cold January night. It was my editor in New York. Despite the 3,000 miles separating us, the ambient post-match chaos, and his Zen-like composed tone, I could tell something good was up.

It was way more than good.

My first novel, The Last Templar, the one he had championed, had hit the New York Times bestseller list at #10 in its first week.

The calls kept coming for 3 months, every Wednesday night, as, astonishingly, the book climbed up the list after that first call: to #6, #5, then #4, with only three stellar names ahead of me: James Patterson, Stephen King and Dan Brown. I say astonishingly, because I never, ever expected any of that. I’d been hoping for, maybe, a week on the extended list. But I did take immense pleasure in it all, given that its saga had begun over ten years earlier.

Cycle back to 1994. I’m a budding screenwriter. No agent. Nothing sold yet. Photocopying my screenplays (two at that point) and DHL’ing them (the pre-email dark ages) to movie industry contacts like, for instance, someone who knew someone who’d once bumped into Stephen Spielberg’s dog-walker in a park. That level of connection. And, surprisingly, not getting results.

Those first two screenplays had been small, personal. And here I was, hanging out with some friends in France, frustrated, telling them I felt like writing something big, epic, a summer movie that the studios would fight over. And a buddy of mine said, What about the Templars?

Boom.

Is reading important to you? Is reading important to anyone?

The answer has to be no—not if the books are boring. Being trapped with a boring book is like a long-haul flight, which I’ve been doing a lot of, lately… that ache in the stomach when all you want to do is land! It’s the same with reading—an inner voice screams, ‘Someone cut these tedious passages!’

Being a teacher, occasionally forced to teach awful books, I quite understand a child’s desire to chuck one in a river and run onto the football pitch. So when I was writing Trash I wanted it to be a page-turner. I wanted a plot that would grip by the throat. I wanted characters who spoke fast, and got on with it! The books I hated as a child were the ones where nothing truly dangerous happened, and everyone behaved responsibly. Even in the soft corner of South London I grew up in, I knew there were mean streets, and gangs, and bigger boys who could kick your teeth in. Being a child was, and is, scary—school is scary.