Which Olivier award nominee hates Dickens?

… are you reading now?

Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann, which is the novel that the movie The Sheep Detectives is based on.

It’s a murder mystery of a shepherd killed by a spade, told from the point of view of his flock. It manages to be both a great detective novel and a brilliant, funny picture of how absurd humans are when viewed from the sheeps’ perspective.

I’m listening to it with my eight-year-old daughter, and she’s loving it every bit as much as I am. I can’t wait to check out the sequel, Big Bad Wool.

… would you take to a desert island?

It would need to be something I could read over and over again. One book that has already passed that test is The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams 

I fell in love with the great detective and his loyal companion Watson when I was about 11, and I don’t think a year has passed since that I haven’t dipped back into the mysteries, either in print or audiobook.

I love this world so much that I decided to set my first novel, The Great Game, in 1905 London, and have my hero come up against the ageing Sherlock and Watson — as well as the young Winston Churchill. I hope I have done them all justice.

… first gave you the reading bug?

Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t know books could do this.’ It was as if I suddenly had a brilliant supercomputer best friend whispering directly into my brain, making me smarter, cooler and funnier.

I ended up meeting Douglas a few years later and have spent a lot of my life adapting HItchhikers and the DIrk Gently books into TV, comics and theatre, so I guess he gave me more than the reading bug. He gave me the writing bug, the make-cool-stuff bug, and the have-fun-with-your-life bugs too.

… left you cold?

I’ve been too embarrassed to admit this until now, but I simply don’t see the point of Charles Dickens. I know he is a national treasure, helped invent Christmas as we understand it, and that the BBC will be making adaptations of Great Expectations until the end of time — but with the possible exceptions of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, I find Dickens turgid and too clever by half.

The Great Game by Arvind Ethan David (Thomas & Mercer, £6.99) is out now