Allan Guthrie

I like to walk when I can. Otherwise, it's the bus - while we still have them.

There is a dark side to Allan Guthrie, but only at the weekends.

I'm teetotal and a vegetarian, which is sometimes a surprise to people who meet me expecting me to resemble one of the characters in my books.

I'm really quite normal. My imagination has some serious kinks in it, that's all.

I try not to think about writers who came before me when I'm writing myself. If I did, given the abundance of literary talent Scotland - and Edinburgh in particular - has bestowed upon the world, I wouldn't be able to get as much as a sentence written.

Maybe it's the buildings, maybe it's the weather, but you can see it affects us - that Scottish gallows humour; our tendency towards bleakness, to look at things in a negative way. Those definitely come out in my writing.

I took an MA course in creative writing a couple of years back, and I was definitely in the bottom of the class.

Some authors are quite happy - and have the time - to do it all themselves, which is great.

Writing books that people want to read is helpful - my most successful book is my only police procedural, a very popular subgenre of the very popular crime fiction genre.

A number of people have read 'Two-Way Split' and made certain assumptions about what the author's like, and I'm highly disappointing to them. I don't drink, I don't eat meat; that's very disappointing for a hard-boiled writer.

Noir focuses on the criminal mind, not a whodunit: more why they did it and will they get away with it. The abnormal psychology is what fascinates me rather than the puzzle-solving aspect.

It's possible to be hard-boiled and not noir, just as it's possible to be noir and not hard-boiled. And it is possible to be both. People debate endlessly what is hard-boiled and what is noir.

Music was something I was encouraged to do, which I appeared to be quite good at, but it was never a passion. Writing was always my first love.

I managed to fit most of the writing to evenings and weekends, and my wife has been very supportive.