Writer, Vaseem Khan
I always have four books on the go. Bathroom book, train book, bedside book and audiobook for the car. I’m currently enjoying: The Winter Job by Finnish writer Antti Tuomainen – a darkly comic slice of European noir, about a man transporting a sofa across country; The Burning Grounds, a Calcutta-set historical mystery by Abir Mukherjee, and The Ministry Of Time by Kaliane Bradley, a contemporary time-travel romance.
I’m also listening to Hugh Bonneville narrate the original Sherlock Holmes short stories. Brilliant! (I once met Benedict Cumberbatch, who played Holmes in the TV series Sherlock, in a pub on the Isle of Wight. My wife forced him to pose for a selfie. He was very nice about it. True story.)
The Silence Of The Lambs by Thomas Harris – beautifully written with the ideal combination of plot and character. Even the names are perfect – from Clarice Starling, the ambitious FBI agent, to Buffalo Bill, the serial killer, to Hannibal ‘the Cannibal’ Lecter.
Can I take Hannibal to the desert island? He’s urbane, charming, well-dressed and hyper-intelligent. What’s not to love? (And he only kills you and eats your liver if you’re impolite.) Absolute gent.
Inspiration: Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards! convinced Vaseem to become a writer
The books that convinced me to become a writer were the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett’s Disc- world novels, especially Guards! Guards! about a group of hapless medieval police battling . . . dragons.
They convinced me to write my first book, a comic fantasy, aged 17. There was one small problem – the book was rubbish. Nevertheless, it set me on my way, and all these years later, you can see Pratchett’s sardonic eye for contemporary society in my own writing, especially in Q’s dry observations of the modern world in Quantum Of Menace.
In my 30s I made a list of 100 of the greatest novels ever written, and then spent five years reading them. Some taught me so much about writing, such as Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong or Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Others were stinkers. One I really didn’t get on with was Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. I’m still not certain what it was about.
Quantum Of Menace by Vaseem Khan (Zaffre, £20) is out on October 23 and will be available from the Mail Bookshop