Because I write a book a year, I always want to do one other project every year that's stimulating in a different way. It means you can be working but not using up your prose juice, you know?

People are interested in crime fiction when they're quite distanced from crime. People in Darfur are not reading murder mysteries.

I hate it when I'm reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what's going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation.

I'd read so much right-wing crime fiction where they find the evidence and shoot the bad guy - I thought there must be another approach.

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 them to clear the air. Also, traditional family food isn't as nice here so there's no payoff for traveling hundreds of miles.

I just got an honorary degree from Glasgow University, and I had to wear around very painful shoes so that I didn't laugh all the way through the ceremony because I felt like an outlaw.

My upbringing was middle-class but my parents' families were both working-class so I had this odd combination of working-class background but in a privileged position.