His work is filled with pop cultural references to both film and music, as well as politics. Orson Welles' "Touch of Evil" and John Ford's "The Searchers" are mentioned prominently in more than one of his books, and Roxy Music is referenced in virtually every novel he wrote. The imagery in his novels is largely cinematic, with expressions such as "fade in/fade out", "quick cut" and "VistaVision"; and sentences such as "a montage traces the next fifteen years" and "If the last reel of Cheryl's life had been a CinemaScope Technicolor movie ...".