Does luck really exist? And if it does how can you improve your own good fortune?
good luck
Improve your lot: a man walking past a message in east London, backdropped by the high-rise buildings of the Canary Wharf financial district. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

People who say, "I don't believe in luck" usually mean one of two things. Either they think everything that happens is done by God's will, or they want to take every scrap of the credit for their good fortune. There's no point in arguing with faith if it's the first; with the second on the whole I don't, in Jane Austen's words, pay them the compliment of rational opposition. They think they made all the right decisions – but they're still lucky to find the moment in time and place where their sort of brain, strength or accent is useful. It isn't that events don't have causes, it's that the person concerned was not necessarily responsible.

I've mostly had very good luck – like getting my first job because my schoolmaster father happened to bring a publisher home who'd been addressing his class, but my husband Gavin Lyall did not. At one time his thriller Midnight Plus One was to be filmed by MGM because Steve McQueen wanted to star as its alcoholic gunman – then Steve McQueen went and died. And when they made a TV series of another book, the BBC changed the transmission date abruptly so there were no books in the shops… If all that isn't bad luck what is? If it rains on your parade it's got a cause all right, but unless you have a touching faith in weather forecasts you could hardly have prevented it; you were just unlucky.