Here's the blurb:

Carver is back in an action packed new adventure that takes him from the war rooms of Washington, D.C., to the merciless Arctic peaks of Norway and from the palaces of the French Riviera to the war-torn Serbian countryside.

At the beginning of No Survivors, Carver lies broken and damaged in a Swiss sanatorium after rescuing his lover, Alix Petrova, from her Russian spymaster. But when Alix's former employers force her to leave Carver and seduce an American military official, Carver emerges from his catatonia and returns--violently-- to his former self. As Carver tracks Alix down, he uncovers a messianic Texas billionaire's chilling plot to reactivate stolen Soviet suitcase nukes and set off a global holy war that will bring about the final Rapture. Driven by a brilliant cast of characters and a terrifyingly plausible story line, No Survivors is a pulse-pounding follow-up that will leave readers breathless.

We have a lot to discuss so let's get down to brass tacks. When the reviewers who don't like you throw compliments instead of darts, you must be pretty pleased. What's it like scoring a try first time on the field?

I can tell you that it makes the sequel a bastard to write. Second novels are like bands' second albums ... The first one is filled with ideas you've been storing up for ages, you put all your heart and soul into it, and then someone says: 'Great. Where's the next one?' But I made it much harder form myself by doing two crazy things. First, I came up with a plot that is just insanely complicated and multi-layered ... I mean, I think it's a good plot, with lots of strong ideas, but it was technically very challenging indeed. And then, just to put the cherry on top, I began the book with Carver in hospital, pretty much a vegetable as a result of what happened at the end of The Accident Man (the two books are basically Accident Man pts 1 and 2, in the sense that there is a direct continuity). And having my protagonist as nimble and quick-witted as a mouldy turnip for the first 120 pages was, uh, challenging, shall we say?!

Although you've been writing for decades, what tempted you to try your hand at thrillers in the first place?

The truth is I love them, read them constantly and am far more interested in and admire professionally the best thriller-writers than 99.9 per cent of the authors who create supposedly highbrow, literary fiction. Anyone can waffle on pretentiously. But all the things that the literary elite (elite in their own minds only, I might add) profess to disdain -- plot, action, structure and so forth -- are actually the elements that are toughest to get right. So the writer in me admired the craft that goes into a thriller and wanted to see if I could do it. Turned out to be by far the hardest thing I'd ever done in my working life -- but worth it in the end. I'd also refer you to something Lee Child said to me this year, to wit: "The idea that thrillers are peripheral to literature drives me nuts. The thriller concept is why humans invented storytelling, thousands of years ago. The world was perilous and full of misery, so they wanted the vicarious experience of surviving danger. It's the only real genre and all the other stuff has grown on the side of it like barnacles."

I fully endorse that point of view. I was at a literary event recently, sitting on a panel, and a lady in the audience, a teacher, started going on about how pathetic and juvenile it was to write action scenes and sex scenes, since these only appealed to the fantasies of teenage boys. As politely as I could, and biting back the many expletive-laden insults I longed to fling in her direction, I pointed out what a pity it was that someone hadn't bothered to tell Tolstoy this before he filled War and Peace with a series of epic descriptions of battle. Dostoyevsky and Conrad might have a word to say about the virtues of thriller-writing, too.

I'm glad you mentioned Lee Child, who had this to say about your work: Audacious, authentic, full of tension and tradecraft . . . maybe it's true and maybe it isn't, but either way it is a great thriller read.

And I know Lee Child doesn't have time for rubbish, in fact at the last Thrillerfest he told us would-be-writers that he didn't believe in character arcs. How about you? Are we going to see Samuel Carver change over the course of the series? I got the sense that Lee Child thought there was a danger in that.

The best way I can answer this is by describing the difference between my method and Lee Child's. I was and still am a huge fan of the Reacher books, both the character of Jack Reacher and that incredibly terse, abbreviated way Lee writes. As I've suggested earlier, I've also had the great privilege of spending a fair amount of time discussing the whole craft of thriller-writing with Lee, and hearing him speak about it at public events. He's very upfront about the fact that he sat down and envisioned a specific hero, with clearly defined characteristics, who could sustain a whole series of books, before he wrote a word of his first Reacher story. And a dozen books in, he is a thousand per cent clear about who Reacher is, how he thinks and behaves, and what he will or will not do. My approach to Carver was utterly different. I started with a story, or more specifically, a situation: that guy in the tunnel. So then the obvious questions were, Who is he? Why is he there?

Then came another question, "How am I going to make readers care enough about this guy that they want to know what happens for him, and root for him, even after he's done this horrendous, unforgivable thing?" I knew I wanted the crash to come very early in the book, so I didn't have much time at all in which to win the reader over. Solving that basic problem took the best part of eighteen months and it was a process that combined a certain amount of logical reasoning -- "How did he get the expertise to do this job? How can he be capable of carrying out an assassination without being a sociopath?" -- with a much more intuitive process of feeling my way into the character, trying to find some way I could understand and relate to him. Because -- you'll be glad to hear -- I have no personal knowledge whatever of the techniques required to be an assassin... except, I suppose, for character assassination, which journalists know all about!

So Carver evolved in an entirely unplanned way, with the weird consequence that he's kind of a mystery to me. If you ask Lee about Reacher, and his appeal to readers, particularly his army of female fans, he knows exactly what makes Reacher popular. I have no idea why people like Carver, still less why lots of women see to find him very attractive. And I really wish I knew the answer to the attraction thing, because then maybe I could use a bit of it myself!

Can you tell us a little about Carver the man?

Carver is not superman. He can't have any woman he wants, just by clicking his fingers, like Bond. He can't go 24 hours without eating, sleeping or urinating, like Jack Bauer. He has a set of professional skills, acquired through years of training and experience, which make him extremely competent at his job. By the nature of his work, he's physically fit. I was very conscious that I didn't want him to be an alcoholic, or recovering junkie, or any of those other standard means by which authors try to give their heroes a bit of edge. He's not a bad person, not messed-up to the point where interactions with other people are bound to be disastrous.

Carver's just a bloke in his mid-thirties, who's been working at his business for about fifteen years, one way or another, and is getting to that point where you think, "Is that it?"

Now, I don't want to start a feud here, after all I'm Canadian, but you British haven't had great things to say about the Americans when it comes to writing. You've said that Americans and the British are identical in all respects except language, even separated by it. Adam Cooper said that "Giving English to an American is like giving sex to a child. He knows it's important but he doesn't know what to do with it." So what do you owe the popularity of your work in America?

Well, I suppose there's a certain obvious curiosity factor that would lead a lot of people to pick up The Accident Man based on the premise that the hero is the man who killed Princess Diana. But if that's all there was, it would be nothing more than a quick, cheap, prurient thrill. Interestingly, neither the US nor the UK publishers who were interested in the book, nor the Hollywood studios that bid for the movie rights made an issue about the Diana-factor (except for a couple of corporate suits who were scared by it). They all, without exception, were interested in the characters: that guy in the tunnel and the people that he encounters. I think it's that focus on those characters, and the relationships between them that has meant that women seem to enjoy The Accident Man just as much as men, which I'm really pleased by. So -- whether you were male or female -- once you started reading, I'd hope it would be the human story that gripped you and made you want to read more. Apart from the multiple chases, explosions, fights, sex and torture scenes, of course!

As you say, your Samuel Carver novel was a twist on the death of Princess Diana. Your second deals with the Al Qaeda, Christian Fundamentalism and suitcase nukes (how can it not be fun?). What was the genesis of this book?

The whole fundamentalist Christian angle, and the notion of 'the Rapture', which is their term for the moment when the believers will physically be gathered up into heaven, was inspired by an article I read in Vanity Fair (and which I credit in the book, in the interests of full disclosure). I already had that notion a few years ago, and was going to use it in a plotline involving a US President, that I later abandoned. So I recycled it this time around. The fact that parts of the book are set in Kosovo was simply a consequence of it being set in 1997-8. I looked around the world at what was happening then, and the biggest issue seemed to be the former Yugoslavia, so I had that in mind as a possible backdrop. The combination of religious Armageddon and civil war led me naturally to think about nuclear weapons and by pure chance, rooting around online, I stumbled upon a news-story about a Russian general telling a US TV show, on 7 September 1997, that his country had lost 100 suitcase nukes. Well, The Accident Man ended on 6 September 1997, so that was too good to be true. So those were the basic ingredients of the story. How they coalesced into the final plot, though, is a total mystery to me!

It's not a very well kept secret that you're in fact an award winning journalist. Why did you choose to use a pseudonym?

Well, in the first place, I thought Tom Cain was a good name to slap on the covers of big, fat thrillers that would get piled up in airport bookstalls, the whole world over. (Hasn't happened yet, but I'm still hoping).  Also, precisely because I'd spent so many years doing a particular kind of writing under a particular name, I wanted a new name for this new kind of writing. It felt liberating, like I could create a new identity for myself, and write in a new voice. And frankly, it was fun. Here I am, a guy in my forties, and I've got the chance to reinvent my dull old self as this cool, mysterious creator of rocking action-adventures. I may be a middle-aged scribe, sitting in a country cottage, tapping out the words amidst the regular family-guy clutter of children, wife, pets, mortgage-payments, flooding drains and unhappy bank-managers. But Tom Cain strikes me as the kind of super-confident guy who drives fast cars, seduces beautiful women and dominates an entire room with the sheer, magnetic force of his personality. So I thought I'd be him for a while, see how that worked...

Hell, a guy can dream, can't he?

How much does your background as a journalist make it into your books?

I do a ton of research, a lot of it online, a lot through books and traditional media, and quite a bit of it face-to-face with experts in various fields. This was one area where years of reporting really helped: I'm very used to asking total strangers to tell me stuff they'd normally keep private. What was fun, though, was discovering how much happier people are to talk when you say that you're writing a thriller, rather than a newspaper article. Contributing to a thriller sounds like fun. Giving away information to a journalist is very rarely that!

So, there's a lot of research, into everything from the construction of small-scale nuclear weapons, to the beliefs of fundamentalist Christians, to the precise role of fish tank oxygenating tablets and nail-varnish remover in putting together a home-made bomb from everyday household items. I try, within reason, to make the plot as plausible as I can. But I was very mindful of the fact that this is fiction. So what really matters is not that you get every factual detail 100 per cent right, but that you tell a damn good story.

I know that readers don't need to wait for the sequel of No Survivors. Assassins is available too. What can you tell us about the third book in the series?

Well, I don't want to give too much away. So let me tell a brief anecdote. I went on an American radio phone-in show to talk about The Accident Man. Despite all my attempts to explain that IT'S JUST A STORY, neither the presenter, nor the callers could be shaken from the conviction that I was describing an actual conspiracy, and an actual assassination, carried out by an actual accident man. At one point, the presenter said, 'So, Tom, tell me, how does an assassin move up the career-ladder?' I thought for a while, wondering what I could say apart from, 'I haven't a bloody clue.' But before I could answer, he carried on, 'I guess he just has to kill the guy ahead of him.' And then I said, 'Thanks. You've just given me my next book.'

Thanks, Tom, great to talk to you!

Tom Cain lives with his family in Sussex, England. In his spare time he is a fanatical supporter of West Ham United FC and the Washington Redskins; a fan of 24, Life on Mars, Flashman, Elmore Leonard, Oldboy and The Black Book; a lousy guitarist but a half-decent singer; and an enthusiastic, but unsubtle gardener.

You can learn more about him and his Accident Man series here: http://accidentman.blogspot.com/.

Michael F Stewart is the author of several graphic novels published by Oxford University Press Canada. 24 BONES is his debut supernatural thriller. His next novel, HURAKAN, will be released in early 2010. Michael lives and writes in Ottawa, Canada.