[This interview first appeared in the Daily Express in December 2000]

He has been called a British Michael Crichton, with a touch of Stephen King; a popular writer whose gripping thrillers are missives from the frontiers of scientific research,the areas where technology and the paranormal can collide.

Host, the first novel to be published on a computer disc, deals with cryonics, prompted when James heard a rumour that Walt Disney had had his body frozen. The starting point for his novel Prophecy is a bad experience with a ouija board. And The Truth is a page-turning Faustian yarn about a yuppie couple, John and Susan, who have just 30 days to find £l.5million and save the business. Along comes a diabolical banker who offers to pay off the debt if Susan will bear his child.

Faith, just out in paperback,deals with plastic surgery. Faith is the wife of a celebrated plastic surgeon who discovers that she is suffering from a rare disease (another of James's interests). Against her psychotic husband's wishes she consults an alternative therapistwho becomes her lover.

Faith is like many of James's women characters - in jeopardy but very well dressed. Invariably James will describeone of their outfits and add a mention of a Cornelia James scarf. It's a motif familiar to his fans. Cornelia James, Peter's mother, died a year ago after a long battle with cancer. She was an extraordinary woman, appointed as glovemaker to the Queen after she was commissioned by Hardy Amies to provide gloves for the then Princess Elizabeth's wedding to Prince Philip.

"My mother had arrived in Britain from of Vienna in 1938, a Jewish refugee with a valise full of gloving skins. Her immediate family got out of Austria but most of her cousins ended up in the concentration camps," he explains. Curiously he was not aware that he was half Jewish until he was 14. His father was "a very English Englishman" who was a chartered accountant and helped Cornelia run her company which at one time employed 500 workers.

Cornelia's illness increased James's interest in alternative therapies. He is sceptical of establishment organisations - pharmaceutical companies (if they had a cure for cancer would it be in their interest to tell us, he wonders) and organised religion in particular "I believe strongly that there is something beyond death and I also believe that it's open to investigation," he says. "The church does not have a monopoly on the afterlife."

After his father's death in 1986 James visited a medium who claimed to see a man standing behind him. The medium'sdescription exactly fitted that of his father After that, I sat down and wrote Possession in six weeks flat. It became an international bestseller and was translated into 22 languages. I'm convinced that he helped me."

James, 51, is also a film producer and businessman. He co-founded Pavilion Internet, one of the UK's first internet service providers. He is currently working on a film version of Possession, which will star a bankable A-list name. There has also been a screen version of Prophecy starring Nigel Havers. Another of James's projects is a movie about the American pin-up Betty Page which will star Liv Tyler and be directed by Martin Scorsese. And Channel 5 recently broadcast The Alchemists, adapted from another of his stories.

James makes occasional appearances in the gossip columns - including his lavish party in Cannes for his 50th birthday. "There is a quiet side to me and an extrovert side to me," he says. "When you're a writer it's good to get involved with the real world - dip into business from time to time."His success as a popular novelist has never earned him literary acclaim. Does he care? "It bothers me enormously," he admits. "I once read a critic who said thatany novel that makes you want to turn the page can't be worth reading. I think there's a prissy snobbishness about writing, particularly in Britain. I have a special abhorrence for the Booker Prize."

A few years ago he split up with his wife Georgina, a solicitor. It was a painful break-up, partly caused by the couple's childlessness. "We went though IVF several times. It's really soul-destroying. I mind about not having children much more than I used to. Luckily Helen, who is now my partner, has two daughters from her first marriage - aged 19 and 21. Almost an instant family."

He never wastes any material - the book he is now working on is about the subject of designer babies. In the cause of research, he tells me that he has just spent the day in a playgroup. "In a sense I look upon my books as my children. We are programmed by our genes to have this desire not to become extinct. And I hope that something of me will live on in my books. Or you could take the Woody Allen view. What was it he said? 'I don't want to live on in my work. I want to live on in my apartment.' That goes for me too. I do enjoy my life."

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