Andrew O'Hagan

They identify with the shape of a life and the consequences of decisions that are made or accidents that occur.

But this book about Marlon Monroe, I'll never forget finding it.

And it had this very striking picture of Marlon with a gold lammy dress on the cover and just opening it and beginning to read about this childhood in Los Angeles.

And then this career in the movies and these tragedies and these marriages.

And I was lost, absolutely lost in this story.

And it taught me something about writing, which is about inviting the

identification of the reader is somehow creating a little piece of moral arithmetic on the page where they can put themselves in place of the characters and see their own lives afresh because of the way you've written it so it was like a that book was like a sort of miniature sort of creative writing class for a sort of 12 year old you know and so I've always I mean my top three sort of would probably change every day I have to warn you but those three books are constants for me of being

exciting and refreshing books.

Oh absolutely.

Marilyn turns up everywhere in my writing.

There are two, for detectives of these things, there are two constants in all of my books.

I think Marilyn turns up in most of them at one point or another the way perhaps

Alfred Hitchcock would cross the screen in all of his movies, almost like a signature.

And also Robert Burns, the great Scottish poet, who's another writer whose collected poems have punctuated my life from first learning to read to right now.

Robert Burns' voice is part of my inner ear now almost.

I hear that delightful, very kind of

democratic sound.

The sound of humanity speaking to itself and each other is there in those poems.

So Robert Burns, I suppose, a bit like Marilyn, is a kind of leitmotif, a constant image that returns and always makes a little appearance in the books at some point.

J.M.