London Blues is about the Soho porn trade in the 60s. What kind of research did you do for that?

I've never made a porno film, although I have been a bit wild with the video camera at home now and again. When I was working on 2001: A Space Odyssey, there was a guy in the Art Dept who collected porn, and I used to follow him round these shops in Soho, and then we'd end up in the Colony Club. I talked to a lot of the shop managers, and it always looked quite fascinating, the Soho porn industry, so that's where the information came from. Soho was a little village in those days. You didn't see designer clothes in the shops. It had petty criminals and rich Bohemians and a particular charm.

Was it difficult getting London Blues published?

Simon & Schuster were going to go with it but they got cold feet. Nobody really understood it, and I almost gave up trying to get it published. I think the feeling was that it wasn't in a clearly defined genre - it had too many literary pretensions for a sexy thriller, and for a literary novel it was too thrillerish. They felt it was neither fish nor fowl. Most publishers are into genre publishing and they're very conservative - I'll always remember one saying to me, "I'm only interested in buying novels where I have to pay at least £300,000 for them."

Your second novel, Sixty-Three Closure, delves deep into the whole JFK conspiracy theory scenario.

It's essentially about someone who comes back to this country after a friend of his has apparently committed suicide. He gets some photographs in the post, and one of them is of Lee Harvey Oswald standing outside a cinema in Hitchen. He manages to date the photograph by going to Colindale Newspaper Library and finding out when that particular film was showing. But when he starts studying the literature, he finds out that Oswald was in Russia at the time - and it sort of goes downhill from there.

If you look at the Kennedy assassination, all that stuff about Oswald being a lone assassin is nonsense. There's no evidence that can put a rifle into his hand on that day. What the Government says happened, and what people believe, couldn't be further apart.

So was there a conspiracy?

The US Congress set up a Select Committee in 1978 to examine Kennedy's death, and their conclusion was that he was assassinated as the result of a conspiracy by unknown participants. One of the first effects of the assassination was on Dr Strangelove. There's a scene in that where Slim Pickens says, "A guy could have a lot of fun in Vegas for $200", or something to that effect. Well, that was post-dubbed. The original script was, "A guy could have a lot of fun in Dallas for $200."

Your new book, Scorpian Rising, has quite a different tone to your two previous books - it that deliberate?

Yes. I wanted to see whether I could write a sort of narrative-driven noir, in a believable, credible way. The genesis of it was quite simple. I couldn't understand everybody going on about The Long Good Friday, which I thought was total crap from beginning to end. I mean it's a boring film, just people standing round with glasses in an East End that's deserted all the time, and with that preposterous IRA stuff at the end of it. I was always complaining about it and one day my son said, "Well, stop complaining about it - go and write something better." And I thought, "Fuck it, I will."

I wanted to write something in the tradition of Get Carter, and not, as Nicholas Blincoe said in The Observer, to merely update it. It's a different sort of novel altogether.

Are you a fan of Ted Lewis?

No, no. My boss [Stanley Kubrick] used to say, "Bad books make good films, and vice versa." Get Carter is a classic instance of a bad book making a good film. The film is so much better than the book - the book's unreadable. But Mike Hodges redid it greatly, and put some magic into it.

In Scorpian Rising, the geography seems central to the story. You talk about places like Deal, Dover, Sandwich - are these places all important to you?

Yes, my ex-wife came from St Margaret's Bay, and she had a lovely big house down there. My son was born in the early 70s when I was absolutely broke and living in Deal, and I spent a season working in Dreamland at Margate. I enjoyed it immensely. I've always been very fond of Margate - I was taken there as a kid - but the poor place is dying on its arse, and in a way Scorpian Rising is a love-letter to Margate, a kind of thankyou. It's a Margate of the mind now. I went down there last June and the place was deserted. There were, however, crowds of East European refugees - it's one of the places that the social services put them, in bed and breakfasts there. And as a result of this, there's a lot of crime. It's gone from being sleazy and vulgar to being a little bit threatening. There are some hard cases down there.

I guess your book reflects that.

Yes, but these are East European hard cases! (Laughs)

Apart from Get Carter, were there any other inspirations going on as regards the characters?

I don't know where the story came from, I just thought I'd like to set something in Margate, but I didn't know why or how. I had this idea of people getting murdered; no matter who this gangster sends down there, something dreadful happens to them. It just took off from there. I wanted something narrative-driven, and where you really wanted to know what was going to happen next. But I didn't want to produce what I call an Iain Banks kind of ending, you know, where it turns out the guy was just dreaming everything - that sort of nonsense. Scorpian Rising is rather like the sort of novel Graham Greene used to write, which he described as an 'entertainment'.

Did you find the resolution hard to write, or did it spring naturally out of the narrative?

No, it came naturally. The original draft had a much more Grand Guignol ending...

So was this book a conscious move away from the conspiracy stuff that you'd put in your first two?

Perry Mason endings I do not like, but I thought if I'm doing something in this genre, I have to play by its rules. It would have been very easy to end it without anything being answered, but I thought that the genre demanded an answer. At the same time, I wanted to leave a little something there...

With your connections in the film industry, are you pushing to get your novels filmed?

If I get time I might, but no one's beaten a path to my door.

That surprises me. London Blues and Scorpian Rising seem very filmic.

That's another amazing thing - I cannot think of a film that has used Margate as a location. Lindsey Anderson shot some stuff down there for a documentary in the 50s and Patrick McGoohan did a scene down there for The Prisoner, but I can't think of anything else.

Goldfinger is set in Reculver.

Yes, that's about ten miles west. It's very dramatic there with the church spires. And of course, a few miles in the other direction is Broadstairs, where John Buchan set The Thirty-Nine Steps. One of Margate's other claims to fame is that T S Eliot went there after he had a nervous breakdown and wrote most of The Wasteland there, and in fact mentions Margate in it.

Are you working on another novel?

No, I'm not, there's been too much going on. What writing I have been doing is on a screenplay adaptation of London Blues. A company bought the screen rights provided I do the screenplay - I mean, why fuck up the novel by having somebody else do it, when you can fuck it up yourself?

It's such a good story, I can't imagine anyone messing it up that much.

You wait and see!

Did Stanley Kubrick ever read your books?

He read London Blues, and he thought it was immensely good. He didn't read anything else, except my JFK filmography, but then we were so busy working on Eyes Wide Shut.

Last question - what do you do to relax, if you ever get the time?

What do I do to relax? (Pauses) Sleep, listen to jazz...I don't do anything like gardening or restoring a car. I couldn't even restore my electric toothbrush.