I have a question...

  Question:  I heard you are a big fan of Holly Hunter in SAVING GRACE. Was she your inspiration for Aggie?

--- from Marta 

 Cate answered: That small, feisty, irrepressible detective was definitely in mind when I created my protagonist. And I’d beg Holly Hunter to play my detective in a heartbeat! She never fails to create a unique character, just like Aggie.

Question: You claim to have seen or read almost every British detective mystery out there. I say that’s impossible. How many have you actually read or watched?

---From T. J. 

Cate answered: I’ve never counted, but that would make a good day’s entertainment.  Off the top of my head . . .   Agatha Christie, eighty-seven novels; the incomparable Anne Perry, thirty-three and still counting; Peter Lovesey, his Sergeant Cribb and Peter Diamond series and others totaling more than 30 bestsellers; Dick Francis has more than forty and his son Felix, at least a dozen of his own.; The Midsomer Murders series number one hundred and something alone! Add Inspectors Lynley, Morse, Frost, Maigret, Lewis, Gently, Walander, Foyle, Alleyn, River, Father Brown and Miss Fisher — tell me when to stop — and that’s not to mention the hundred and one Sherlock Holmes movies and detectives Cadfael, and Daniel and Pascoe, and Jonathan Creek, and Rosemary and Thyme. Add to that the Ruth Rendel Mysteries, Dorothy Sayers’s Peter Whimsey, and PD James’s Dalgliesh, — and I know I’ve already left out authors Ngaigo Marsh and George Simeon, and TV shows Death in Paradise, Scott and Bailey, Luther, and DCI Banks.  I’m sure I’ve missed more than half!

Time to admit the Brits are the best at what they do — and they do mystery very well.  With that thought, let's stop the count at somewhere around a thousand, give or take a few hundred.