Peter’s wife, Shelia Halladay, was interviewed by CrimeReads, where she told a bit about how he worked.
“Peter was a very disciplined and committed writer and he always met his deadlines. Once Peter started on a manuscript, he was pretty steady. While he was flexible and didn’t commit to a strict schedule, he would generally concentrate on writing for three to four hours in the morning. I was very lucky that he did not wake up in the middle of the night to frantically write. He would tease that if the writing was going well in the morning, he would go back to it in the afternoon and if it was not going well, he would go to the pub.
“As Peter was heading towards writing the conclusion of the book, his pace of writing would pick up. Because he did not plot out the books in advance, he had to keep all of the strands of the main plot, secondary stories etc. in his head. It was a like giant puzzle that he had to put together. The actual murderer was not particularly important to Peter and he would usually be over half way through the manuscript when he would announce that he knew ‘who did it’. He always found it amusing when people would tell him the page when they knew who the murderer was, and he would tell them that he didn’t know until much later.”
Read the entire interview on CrimeReads.
Peter Robinson 