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Philip Temple interviewed by Bob Cornwall:

How did you arrive at that very distinctive style? I've tried hard to find equivalents. Only James Ellroy comes close.

Parts of Ellroy I like, the jarring impact of the language. But there are times when I want to relax. I'd like to see a proper sentence, just one proper sentence.

But generally I've come to it because I want to say things as briefly as possible, and I want to somehow capture how the words feel in my head. So if I leave off pronouns and all sorts of things... As I said to one woman, I've taught English grammar and I know what I am doing. And my dialogue, I've always wanted to truncate my dialogue. Ever since I read George V. Higgins's Friends of Eddie Coyle, I've really wanted to write a book in dialogue. (Now that I am writing film scripts, I don't want to write a book in dialogue!). I've tried to create a distinctive voice, so it's fairly self-conscious. And I don't write like that normally. You won't get an e-mail from me like that.

But mostly I'm interested in the way we share, although we may come from opposite sides of the world, we're part of a linguistic community. And the way we speak to each other, we leave things out, we don't have to say full sentences, or point everything out. And when you find people that work together intimately, or who spend a lot of time together (women are like this sometimes, domestically, whatever), particularly colleagues who do the kind of work that doesn't lend itself to exposition, like, we know what we are doing here, they don't spell things out to each other.

So what I am trying to do is to say, inside this community, this linguistic community that we share, when we speak to each other, what don't we have to say. That's what I've tried to do. I've tried to take all of the bits out that people would not say to each other. I want to come close to some sort of naturalistic language. If you try too hard, it's art. And there's another line you can fall over, into transcript, and it goes clunky on you.

Full interview here.