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.