Occupation: Crime Writer Birth: 1966
I love Mikhail Bulgakov. He is very original and takes the story to unexpected places. I didn't realise political writing could be so funny..
I grew up in London under Thatcher and that really was disgusting. A feeding frenzy..
I'm always represented as a bit of a class warrior - a bit Down With Men and Down With Middle-Class People. Whereas I'm actually very fond of men and….
We don't really go in for big family dinners, but Scottish people are famously confrontational. It's a cultural thing, so maybe we don't need to have….
I respond very well to rules. If there are certain parameters it's much easier to do something really good. Especially when readers know what those a….
There's a real emphasis on being witty in Scotland, even in crime novels..
I have two children. They are more fun than anything in the world, and it's more immediate fun than the hard slog of writing..
Most of the people who write to me are really clever, really engaged. They just want to say that they have read my book and liked it..
I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form..
I always wanted to work at Take A Break magazine, you know, just to inject a little bit of politics into their stories. I applied for a job there aft….
A man who thinks he has a higher purpose can do terrible things, even to those he professes to love..
People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries..
Even if people do wrong, we're social animals, so what can we do about stopping them doing the same things in future? Saying people are 'bad' or 'evi….
Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve..
In the 'Garnethill' trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O'Donnell's dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did la….
I think the negative traits are what makes us love other human beings, the foibles and the flaws..
Crime is a very hard genre to feminise. If you have a female protagonist she is going to be looking after her mum when she gets older; she is going t….
Usually when I'm trying to establish character, I try and find out where they live..
None of us know what is going to sell or what people want to read..
There's always these giant baffling books, like 'The Da Vinci Code.' People say it's not as well written as 'Midnight's Children.' Why aren't people ….
In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there's no real way o….