rather than Monk. You'd have had to distort the story to have Monk investigating at that point. Somebody who's going to be served with breach of promise goes to a lawyer, not a private investigator. It wouldn't have made sense to have him go to Monk.
Exactly. Yes, that was the story.
Yes. That's where it is. The readership is American.
Well, if I tell you that
Oh, I hope so. If it's taken that long in my own country. I mean, I've got a few out, but I'm not a big name at all. Not at all.
In relation to money. Not necessarily breeding. Because you can't buy class.
Americans sometimes say to me that they have no class system themselves. All human beings have class systems. It can be based on a different thing in a different country, but the thing about breeding is, you can't buy it. If you have to say it, you haven't got it. It's a kind of an inner confidence and you don't have to say it. And it's curious but those people who really have breeding can be very quiet and very self-effacing but they have that total confidence. They don't believe in themselves: they know.
Well, thank you. I try. Besides, on the east coast they also have exactly the same class system. It's the same thing.
Yes: according to the figures it goes up a little bit each year. It's been absolutely steady, there's no just gently all the time. But it's also gone up quite remarkably in France and in Spain. Does nicely in Italy, in Portuguese and Japanese. And they're on audio tape and
In the UK. Done by Yorkshire Television. Now, watch when I name drop, I do it well: it's actually Prince Edward's company that's done it. And he does actually work at it. He was there on set. He actually is a very nice chap. And he has a nice sense of humor, too. He was on the Des O'Connor show – which is a sort of chat show – just before the program aired in the UK and he really was funny. He had them rolling around. And it's all spontaneous. None of it was thought up before.
It's called
What do you think? [Laughing?]
Yes. I liked it very much. I was very lucky. I waited quite a while and worked with people I believed would not have much of a chance of getting it done, but if they did would make a really good job of it. And they did get the chance to get it done, and I think they made a superb job of it. It's very, very true to my characters. The stories altered a little bit. Condensed, of course because it's a different medium. But the characters are exactly as I wrote them and quite a lot of the dialog is straight from the book. But the casting director picked them right out of my mind. I'm very, very fortunate.
Well, if you've got to stick it in a genre… mystery is so wide. You can put it in: a mystery novel. Historical mystery novel. But I don't think I invented them: I think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got there a day or two before me.
I don't like putting things into descriptions, but I suppose you have to.
There's always a crime and it always gets solved. I think of the end and then I think, 'Well, how did this happen?' and then you write it that way. You start at the end, and then go back and write and go that way. Not everyone does, but I do. Some people just sit down at the page and start off. I start from what happened, including the why. And I don't like, 'He was mad' as an answer. Unless he's been driven mad by something we can understand. And I've had one or two of those: it's something that we can understand that put him in that position.
Thank you. I'll take your tape. And play it back to myself when I'm feeling low.
Yes. I've got a fantasy coming out in Britain on the 4th of February. It doesn't exactly fit in that genre, there's just no better way to describe it. An allegory. A spiritual journey in story form.