The Most Difficult Part Of Any Crime

No Matter How Many Awards You've Won Or How Many Sales You've Got, Come The Next Book It's Still A Blank Sheet Of Paper And You're Still Panicking Like Hell That You've Got Nothing New To Say.

I Love Short Stories - Reading And Writing Them. The Best Short Stories Distill All The Potency Of A Novel Into A Small But Heady Draught. They Are Perfect Reading Material For The Bus Or Train Or For A Lunchtime Break. Everything Extraneous Has Been Strained Off By The Author. The Best Short Stories Pack The Heft Of Any Novel, Yet Resonate Like Poetry.

I Wrote My First Short Story For A Competition And Won Second Prize. Another Competition Came Up And I Won First Prize. The First Story Was Published In A Newspaper. The Second Went Out On Radio.

I've Always Written. At The Age Of Six Or Seven, I Would Get Sheets Of A4 Paper And Fold Them In Half, Cut The Edges To Make A Little Eight-page Booklet, Break It Up Into Squares And Put In Little Stick Men With Little Speech Bubbles, And I'd Have A Spy Story, A Space Story And A Football Story.

I'm Interested In Scotland Now And Then, How It's Changed. I Want To Get The Reader To Think About That By Thinking About Something From The Past. How Has Society Changed, How Has Policing Changed, Have We Changed Philosophically, Psychologically, Culturally, Spiritually?