Want to write a bestselling book? It might be a good idea to ask Michael Crichton for some advice. After all, he's sold more than 100 million books, so he must know what works and what doesn't. His latest thriller, State of Fear, in which eco-terrorists create natural disasters to convince the public that global warming is real, has been on the bestseller lists for 14 weeks now. Eamonn Fitzgerald asked Michael Crichton about the influence on his work of those two giants of 19th century English fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, and Henry Rider Haggard, the imperial adventure author.

Fitzgerald: What advice would you give to somebody setting out on the thriller-writing trail?

Crichton: I learned a great deal by reading books that I admired very carefully. The books that most impressed me I actually hardly remember now. There was a writer named Len Deighton who had done a series of books about an agent named Harry Palmer that Michael Caine played. But how they were done, how they made me feel exactly, how they were structured I studied quite intensely — not in an attempt to necessarily do what Deighton had done, but to really see how the effects were created. And I think that's a very good thing for writers to do.

Crichton: Conan Doyle was probably my favorite author growing up. I don't know that he's widely understood in this way, but Conan Doyle is a master at advancing both plot and character through dialogue. It makes the stories go very quickly. He was also able to invoke what we would now call a cinematic technique: you can see him move to jump the dialogue with a single sentence. Someone will say to Holmes, "Well, we need to go now into the bedroom". And then the next sentence from Holmes is in the bedroom. He'll say, "Ah, I see that, beneath the bed, this or that is true." And you've moved almost as if it was a cut, a film cut. There's no need for a literary transition; your mind makes it.

Crichton: I did read Rider Haggard. He has this romanticism that, I suppose in a certain sense, has undergone a revival, if you look at something like the second Indiana Jones film, which seems to me very much a Rider Haggard sort of story. But in terms of the way that he handled his text, his stylistic approach, I mean it seems to me much more 19th-century and denser, and it didn't flow in the way that somebody like Conan Doyle was able to do.

Crichton: I suppose that many people would not think of Indiana Jones so much as a thriller, [but] more as an adventure story or something; but without question, the Bourne films are [what] I would think of as classic thrillers. I mean, they're thrillers in the sense of The 39 Steps, pumped up in some 21st-century mode.

Page 1: Fact and fiction
Page 2: Plastic dinosaurs
Page 3: A Crichton sampler
Page 4: Hostile reaction
Page 5: US politics
Page 6: Holmes fan