My earliest reading memory
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I think I was about four or five. My sisters had had it first (of course) and they had drawn all over the pages, which just added to their appeal. No one disturbed me and I made the wonderful discovery that you can spend a whole day just reading – or at least you could in our house.
My favourite book growing up
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. At one time I could quote whole pages of it by heart. I loved the strange American vocabulary – bangs, overalls, sleeping in cots on the porch – and the descriptions of the sleepy southern town. Atticus was my first literary hero and for a long time I wanted to be a lawyer because of him.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I read Fame Is the Spur by Howard Spring when I was about 15. It’s about the rise of the labour movement and I suppose it politicised me. I was deeply impressed by the descriptions of the suffragettes and shocked by how terribly they were treated. I became a very annoyingly right-on teenager, always organising petitions and protests. I also wrote satirical political pantomimes which, thankfully, do not survive. One was called Aladdin and the VAT.
The writer who changed my mind
I was brought up as a Catholic, though in a rather relaxed Italian way. I went through many stages with religion – from piety to atheism. Then, in my 20s, I read How Far Can You Go? by David Lodge, which follows the lives of a group of Catholic students in the 50s and 60s. Lodge is great on the absurdities – the “snakes and ladders” of heaven, hell, limbo and purgatory – but he also understands the comfort of religion. The characters in the book decide that they can stay in the church while disagreeing with most of its rules. This felt like the perfect solution at the time, but now I’m finding it difficult to be even a “freelance Catholic”. I think Lodge imagined that the church would have reformed itself by now, but sadly there’s little evidence of that.
The book that made me want to be a writer
My mum read to me for a long time, long enough to get into adult books. She had a wonderful voice and I remember asking her to read a passage from David Copperfield over and over again. It was the shipwreck scene, when Steerforth is killed. Although I couldn’t have said why I was so enthralled, I think it was the sheer descriptive power of Dickens’s language. I remember thinking: I’d love to be able to do that.
The book or author I came back to
I spent a lot of my English degree pretending to have read Eliot’s Middlemarch. It seemed like the most boring book in the world. But when I finally read it, I thought it was one of the most thrilling and startling stories I’d ever read.
The book I reread
I reread all the time. Georgette Heyer, Jilly Cooper, Agatha Christie, Wilkie Collins, Dickens (Charles and Monica), Jane Austen, lots of children’s books. If I love a book I read it multiple times. When I first read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins I thought it was an intriguing mystery. Then, when I was trying to write a crime novel myself, I saw it as a masterclass in how much to tell the reader and when. Now I appreciate the characters most and the way that the plot unfolds through them. I’m sure my DS Clough was inspired by Sergeant Cuff.
The book I could never read again
I used to love The Famous Five books by Enid Blyton. I think they were the first crime novels I ever read. But, when I went back to them recently, I was shocked by how xenophobic they were. I’m half Italian so was one of the much-mocked “foreigners”, but I don’t think I realised that at the time.
The author I discovered later in life
Barbara Pym. The first book of hers I read was Excellent Women, which is deceptively small in scale – almost like a locked-room mystery – but underneath the surface there are swirling undercurrents of comedy and tragedy. I’m a convert.
• The Locked Room by Elly Griffiths has been shortlisted for Crime Novel of the Year at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing festival, which runs in Harrogate from 20-23 July. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
