C

Unit 26- C

People often ask, ‘How did you learn all those languages?’ but the thing is I lived in several different countries when I was growing up, and it just seemed natural to speak the language.”

I was actually born in Manchester, in the UK, but my family moved very soon after that, and we lived in Paris for a while. My mother came from there, and she always spoke to me in French, from an early age. Later on we moved to Austria, for my father’s work, and I spent long holidays in Italy with my sister, so my Italian is pretty good.

I went to university in Munich - that’s a great city! - and then after graduating from there, I became a teacher. I started teaching French, German, Italian and English to private students. I really enjoyed it, and I think I was quite good at it, too. I remember my star pupil was an Italian count who lived in a palace!

Well, not really a palace, but a huge villa, with servants and so on.

Anyway, after a bit I realised that being a teacher would never make me rich, and for some reason I thought that being a writer would! Crazy, eh? But I was right, as it turned out.

I decided to write detective stories, thrillers, that sort of thing, and I just seemed to have a gift for it. I write a new one every year, and they’ve sold very well. In 1990 I won the Silver Dagger award for the best crime writer of the year. I’ve now bought a. fantastic house on the south coast of England, near Torquay, and that’s where I live.

I’ve always worked at home - I don’t need an office or anything. It’s all very simple, really …