Quotes by Sara Sheridan

A chap’s impending death has a way of focusing the mind.


Google maps are one thing but theres no substitute for pounding the beat and I spent quite a bit of time figuring out how to break into the back of the houses on Belgrave Place. Once I even for followed by a suspicious householder - Id been hanging around staring at the exterior of his flat for too long.

In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, What are you doing? he questioned me. The thing is, Im writing a book, I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. Everyone is writing a book, my dear, he said. Between you and I, its his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into.

In crime books its possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because its new. Nowadays its part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it.

The sky was a sparkling succession of black diamonds on black velvet made crystal clear by the blackout.

New technologies and resources offer exciting opportunities. They democratise access to information.

Sometimes a person’s first assumption was very telling. It revealed how they perceived the situation.

People see what they expect to see.

I didn’t want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank.

I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.

The smell of tobacco usually reminded Mirabelle of being a child – coming downstairs in the morning when the dinner party her parents had hosted the night before was cleared away, but the scent of cigars still lingered.

The law don’t like jazz clubs. No one wants anything to do with that kind of trouble.

One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. Its the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.

Youve got to make an effort to get the details right, because even through someone picks it up and knows its a novel, they know someones made it up and they know its not real, if you make a small mistake they will cease to imaginatively engage with the story.

The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.

This is the cusp of an age at least as exciting and as brimful of potential as the early days of the printing press.

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.

The fifties is a decade when every year is markedly different from the one before and after. That doesnt happen every decade. 1983 isnt that much different from 1986. But 1953 is very different from 1956.

I thought of myself mixing the fragrance of a certain day – the heavy musk of the hillside after the rain with the lightness of fresh blossoms doused in the downpour. I thought of each little bottle as the essence of a happy day or a sad one. I mixed the scent of a lonely moment – sandalwood and bergamot lingering over a rich, peppery base.