When I ask her whether she reads any new crime fiction, she is politely dismissive. “I have tried to read some of them but I don’t have the time, because there are so many other good books,” she says, grinning. “I read maybe 15 pages and then I read a bit in the middle and read the end.” What about Henning Mankell, whose Kurt Wallander novels owe so much to her work? “I like the first books. I don’t like his later books, they’re boring. I think they lack humour. When you are writing crime stories, it’s called “noir”, it’s about murder. If you are going to stand writing about this, you have to put in humour, otherwise it gets too black.”