Jim Talbot asked Tana French:

How did you become so knowledgeable about policework, interrogation methods, and the interplay of detective office personalities?

Tana French I'm very lucky: I know a retired detective who's incredibly generous with his time and knowledge, and who's answered a wild variety of questions for me over the years. Not only that, but he answers the questions I didn't even know I needed to ask. I'll ring him and say 'What would you do in this situation?' and he'll say, 'It depends. What time is it? How old is the witness? Do you think your suspect's done X or Y? Do you have the fingerprint results in yet? Have you already asked the suspect A and B?' And he tells me stories. I don't know what I'd do without those. They're where I get the sense of what it's actually like to be a detective, the atmosphere, the texture of it... A few detectives have emailed me over the years to say I got it right; those emails blow me away, and they're all down to this guy.

I do occasionally move away from the facts. Just to take the most obvious example, there's no Murder squad in Ireland, but I wanted that sense of a tight-knit, elite unit, so I made one up. But I want any departure from the facts to be deliberate, for the sake of the story, rather than being just because I didn't know what I was talking about.

I have huge amounts of respect for detectives. These are people who are willing to take on the responsibility of dealing with life and death and truth and justice on a daily basis. Me, if I have a bad day at work, I end up with adjective overload. If they have a bad day at work, someone could *die*. I'm in awe of that - and if I'm going to write about it, I want to come as close as possible to doing it justice.

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