"I'd gotten interested in [Ruth] Rendell and those kind of writers, who were able to take a part of England and create a detective through whose eyes they could examine the area as much as investigate crimes. I think it may have been that I'd not been in Canada very long then, so I was a bit nostalgic -- I wanted to re-create England in my writing. So I invented a large market town in Yorkshire -- a town rather like [Yorkshire's] Richmond. And then came Banks. I wanted a protagonist who was trying to escape the big city, who'd seen it all and was close to burnout, and who thought that maybe a transfer would help him."
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