Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’ve just turned forty-four and last week I published my fourth book, Whisky Leaks, which is part 3 of The Dirty Rouge detective series, set in the Scottish city of Glasgow.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My latest novel – Book 3 in The Dirty Rouge detective series – is called Whisky Leaks. It’s a tongue in cheek title derived from the famous WikiLeaks news website, which specialises in publishing secrets online. Why? Because the book’s hard-drinking Scottish hero – suspended DCI Pat Curzon – relies on the skills of a computer hacker in order to help solve the murder of Vanessa Cummins, a Glasgow job-recruitment queen who’s been put in charge of the UK Government’s controversial Work Project, which aims to get unemployed people off the dole and back into work. One feature of the book is to represent the plight of people living on benefits in 21st Century Britain and to shine a light on the practice and consequences of ‘sanctioning’, where people have their payments suspended and are expected to exist on literally no money whatsoever if they are not deemed to be seeking employment enthusiastically enough. Many people have suffered over recent years as a result of the policy, and in Whisky Leaks, a four-year-old boy dies of hunger after his parents are sanctioned.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Apart from sitting at my computer on a penny-farthing bicycle, wearing a stag’s antlers on my head and with my left hand in a jug of custard while typing, I have no unusual writing habits. My usual MO is to simply let everything just flow out in longhand with a pen on paper – the most enjoyable part of the process in my opinion – then I type up everything I have onto the computer and then read through from beginning to end about 50,000 times, editing and amending as I go.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Where do I begin? My biggest influence is probably Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
What are you working on now?
Having only just published Whisky Leaks, I am in that unusual space for a writer where I am currently uncommitted. There’s a blank sheet of paper waiting for me to write that first sentence and then, that’s it, the dye is cast and my whole life will be absorbed by the process again. So, I think I’ll enjoy the rest of the summer before incarcerating myself in the writer’s cell again. What I can say is that there’s still a hell of a lot for DCI Curzon to do and even more to reveal about the Dirty Rouge.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
As regards promotion, I simply post on book sites on Facebook and Twitter and hope for the best. Without sounding too sycophantic, I must say that my previous books most definitely increased their exposure after being kindly promoted by Awsomegang, for which I am grateful. Thank you.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Well, I’m certainly no authority and am learning loads all the time myself. But what I can say is that the more you write, the more you learn and the better you become.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
I can’t remember. Being a writer it’s been a long time since I’ve been out the house and spoken to anybody to take advice from. But I think the older I get the more potent a certain quote of Socrates becomes: ‘To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.’
What are you reading now?
Nothing. I’m absolutely useless at multi-tasking. I know they say that a good writer should read as well as write each day, but I can only focus on one thing at a time and I don’t want my stream of thought to become too cluttered. That said, responding to this question has been a valuable exercise because I will now probably use this break to read a book or two. Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre has been lying on my desk like an unopened bill for the past five years now.
What’s next for you as a writer?
I intend to continue my adventure following The Dirty Rouge around in my head. Hopefully this is just the beginning of a long literary relationship with Pat Curzon. It feels almost like he chose me, not the other way round.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Ulysses by James Joyce – because it get’s better and funnier with every read, especially if you read Homer’s Odyssey as a companion piece. Cervantes’s Don Quixote, because it’s the best mirror in which to view the absurdities of human behavior. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky because of its intensity, and the complete works of William Shakespeare, because he’s the master of appealing on two levels, serving both the high-brow literati and the everyday person searching for easy entertainment. Of the books I haven’t read yet, I suppose I’d have to take that copy of Being and Nothingness with me.
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