The crime novelist on the dark side of Dahl, the joy of Virginia Woolf and the comforts of Terry Pratchett

My earliest reading memory
An Andy Capp comic strip in my dad’s newspaper when I was six. It was about horse racing and my dad was watching horse racing on the telly. My brain just broke. Where did stories come from? Who wrote them? Why? Were they all about our family? Poor Dad. He just wanted to put a bet on, and I was pestering him about the nature of storytelling.

My favourite book growing up
My parents didn’t realise Roald Dahl wrote adult books, so I read some stuff I probably wasn’t ready for. There’s one story where a put-upon housewife kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb which she then feeds to the policemen who come to investigate. After that, James and the Giant Peach didn’t really cut it any more.