It took at least thirty years to build a cathedral and most took longer because they would run out of money, or be attacked or invaded. However, those of my friends who are writers saw immediately how the building of the church would be the spine of the story and the focus for the lives of all the characters. They said, “you know, you’ve had a lot of success with these thrillers, are you sure you want to write about building a church?”. When I started talking about the idea, some of my friends were quite shocked. Before too long, it occurred to me to channel this enthusiasm into a novel. I would go to a town, like Lincoln or Winchester, check into a hotel and spend a couple of days looking around the cathedral and learning about it. I became a bit of a 'train spotter' on the subject.
I read a couple of books on architecture and developed an interest in cathedrals. When I started writing, back in the early Seventies, I found I had no vocabulary for describing buildings. It’s overwhelmingly the book that readers talk to me about when I meet them in bookshops. It still sells about 100 000 copies a year in paperback in the US, it was number one in the UK and Italy and it was on the German best seller list for six years.
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