The new book really reminds me of the 1955 film, The Night Of The Hunter, with two children pursued by a terrifying villain (played by Robert Mitchum). Your work is often peppered with book and film references, especially John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Is that deliberate?

I write with some knowledge of all the stories I’ve read and the films I’ve seen. I wasn’t consciously modelling [La Belle Sauvage] on Night Of The Hunter or Gerard Bonneville on Robert Mitchum – I wonder who I’d cast? That’s interesting...

But for example, in Northern Lights, the way the bears’ fight is taken from Paradise Lost and is called a “Homeric simile” which expands over several lines, but it doesn’t matter if no one recognises it. I use it because it works, not because I want people to think ‘Oh how clever he is’.

Your new villain Gerard Bonneville: he’s one of the most terrifying characters I’ve ever come across. Charming, vicious and abusing his sexual power over women especially. It was interesting reading him just as the Harvey Weinstein story was breaking…

Well, I wasn’t getting it from Harvey Weinstein because we didn’t know about that yet, but he does come from watching how people can behave with one another. You can imagine feelings and ways of behaviour that are quite horrible, and we must never underestimate where imagination can take us.

One thought that might have seeped into Gerard though is that I’ve been putting together a new version of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales for Penguin Classic. Reading them and rereading them closely, it can’t help but affect you and he is a bit of a monstrous fairytale villain. I was very pleased with him, in fact.

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