Showing posts with label people authors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label people authors. Show all posts
Thursday, 5 January 2012
PEOPLE: Snowballing success of ex-News man.
THE scene was one of sheer chaos. There were screams, perhaps the occasional retch as a stomach emptied its technicolour contents and a lot of angry words - some of the four-lettered variety - quietly muttered under exasperated breath.
All ingredients of a typically dark Christopher Brookmyre novel - albeit minus the pints of blood, extreme violence and gruesome killings. Still, as experiences go, it was certainly verging on murder.
The difference was this particular scene was played out at a heaving, over-populated and largely underwhelming kiddies' theme park, where the so-called Tartan Noir author had taken his young son.
"It was awful," he groans, recalling the holiday treat for Jack, eight, that involved standing in a lot of queues for a very long time in the vain hope of a 30-second turn on a not particularly thrilling fairground ride. "Not really recommended," he shrugs.
Unlike his latest book, Snowball in Hell, currently receiving a clutch of five-star reviews and following in the same pulsating vein as his previous bestselling darkly humorous, bloodstained and provocative efforts.
In it, Brookmyre unleashes one of his most disturbed characters Simon Darcourt - revived after apparently dying in his earlier book, A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away - and sets him on a bloody journey through myriad issues close to his own heart, from loud-mouthed journalists to the media's obsession with petty celebrity and blind religious faith.
Think Big Brother meets A Nightmare on Elm Street with outspoken newspaper columnists and religious fanatics as the unfortunate housemates.
Perhaps his theme is not surprising given Brookmyre's personal background - he worked as a sub-editor on the Evening News while perfecting his first two novels and spent his childhood in a community steeped in West of Scotland Catholicism.
"I suppose the character of Simon is a good way of taking your own prejudices and petty annoyances and blowing them up," he says.
The trademarks of Brookmyre's work - blood, terror, murder and chaos emerge just a few pages in, when his violent anti-hero imprisons and methodically slays one particularly vociferous newspaperman after first revealing his victim's pathetic hypocrisy to a captivated nation of viewers.
"The book is a look at the modern media as much as anything," adds the 39-year-old, whose own religious conversion from Catholicism was complete with his recent installation as the Humanist Society of Scotland's new President.
"I thought of these tub-thumping tabloid journalists, the hang 'em high brigade, how would they react if they were put in a situation where they had to choose between coming face to face with a prisoner who had been through rehabilitation and one who hadn't. Which prisoner would they choose?
"The book looks at the way that celebrities, no matter how minor and how little they have to celebrate, are treated as if they from a different planet and everyone else is a lesser being.
"The way kids see talent and celebrity programmes and read Heat," he adds, warming to his theme, "they think all that matters is to be famous and it doesn't matter what you are famous for.
"The book tries to show that there's something more to aspire towards, but just settling down and having a family isn't going to get anyone on the cover of Heat."
Yet it's one of his characters' thoughts on a far more delicate subject - Islam, the burkha and religious fanaticism that could put Brookmyre's latest novel under a more controversial spotlight. At one point his female cop Angelique de Xavia, another character along with magic man Zal Innez revived from A Big Boy Did it and Ran Away, rolls up in a niqab described as a "mobile gazebo" and reflects on religious worship as "mind control".
"I think I offend everyone in this book," he shrugs. "There's the female character who has issues with the burkha and jilbab, but the book also draws distinction in the ways radical Islamists are separate from the rest."
The people most likely to be offended by his books, he argues, are the ones who don't actually read them.
After his three sold-out appearances at the Book Festival, September will see him make a joint appearance at the Liquid Room with acclaimed singer/songwriter Billy Franks, whose fans include Bono, Oasis and Peter Gabriel.
Is there any chance he might return to the Evening News for a stint on the subs' desk? With a string of bestsellers, industry awards and ideas for his next novel already taking shape, you could say - like his book's title - there's not a snowball's chance in hell.
"Hmm, much as I'd like to," he says with a gracious laugh, "I really don't think so."
Snowball in Hell by Christopher Brookmyre is published by Little, Brown on August 14. Tickets for his appearance at the Liquid Room on September 9 with Billy Franks cost GBP 6 from Waterstone's (West End), 128 Princes Street.
A LIFE IN WORDS
WITH around a dozen dark novels now under his belt, each mixing political and social issues with sinister narrative, black humour, crime and usually a fair degree of inventive violence, stirring up strong opinions is nothing new to Christopher Brookmyre.
His childhood was spent in Barrhead and he studied at Glasgow University where he satisfied his urge to work with words on the student newspaper, involved in layout and sub-editing.
There was a stint in London with Screen International which proved handy when it came to overseeing the sale of his own work, including quite Ugly One Morning starring James Nesbitt, to film companies.
These days home is back over in the west, closer to his beloved St Mirren.
Edinburgh Evening News August 2008
PEOPLE: Capital is Marr's spiritual home
BLAME it on the girl, but if it hadn't been for a certain lady who happened to catch young Andrew Marr's eye, then London's political empire might have breathed a little easier.
But, perhaps more importantly, a nation of television viewers might never have come face to face with the small screen's most unlikely star.
Today Loretto-educated Marr is among the country's best known faces - and pair of ears - in television current affairs, balancing incisive political comment with celebrity interviews as host of a Sunday morning chat show and as a regular contributor to a catalogue of programmes and publications.
Soon he will adopt yet another, slightly more surprising persona: that of fearless action man, as he takes to the heavens on board a variety of flimsy flying machines and wobbly sky-borne apparatus to present his new series, Britain from Above.
In it, he tours the country from hundreds of feet in the air, swooping through the Great Glen on a microlight, plunging to earth tied to a skydiver and trying to keep talking through chattering teeth while strapped to a paraglider.
It's all intended to bring us a new perspective on a familiar landscape. Yet none of it might have come about if it hadn't been for a
romantic crush, way back when the young Andrew Marr was carving himself a name in journalism here in Edinburgh.
"My first job was on The Scotsman," he says. "It was quite some time ago now but I remember leaving to go to London thinking I'd only be going there very briefly. I fully intended to be back in Scotland quickly.
"I was chasing a woman, of course," he reveals. "But when I caught her, I fairly quickly realised that I had been the fish and she was the angler - she didn't waste much time in throwing me back."
The story makes him roar with laughter - it is, he adds, the reason why London is now home and not Edinburgh.
"But I very much feel that Edinburgh is my adoptive home," he adds quickly. "I'm from Dundee, sure, but I went to school at Loretto in Musselburgh and I feel very, very close to Edinburgh."
Which might make viewers of his newest television series wonder why the city he feels such a connection with is rather skirted around as the flying Mr Marr skims the nation's horizon, pointing out geological rarities, historical and industrial landmarks, hills and rugged coastlines.
Throughout the series he whizzes over the Welsh Borders in a hang glider, buzzes once secret military bases in the Midlands and soars over Oxford in a biplane. As for Edinburgh...
"The series is driven by stories about ancient history, geology," he says. "But it's completely non-comprehensive in terms of the places we were able to take in.
"The Scottish sequence ended up being the Great Glen - it's like the San Andreas Fault of Great Britain and Europe, it's a huge geological issue. So we did that.
"We did a lot of London too, obviously because of the size, and we looked at Oxford as an example of how a town has spread over the years."
Certainly, filming Britain From Above is about as far from Marr's typical working environment - a stuffy W12 television studio - as possible.
"I can't remember how many different ways I've been in the air but it's at least two or three different helicopters, four or five different planes, including historic planes from the Thirties, a Tigermoth and a silver Synergy jet - which is, apparently, Kylie's transport of choice," he says.
"On my first day I was strapped in a microlight, which is like a motorised tricycle with wings which goes faster, then dangerously fast until suddenly you are a couple of thousand feet up.
"It's an astonishing feeling. Zipping down the Great Glen very low and seeing it from a bird's eye view, a buzzard's binoculars, was spectacular."
He may not give the immediate impression of a James Bond in waiting - Marr's biggest claim to fame apart from his journalistic skills has been in having a set of distinctive lugs - yet it appears the new series has unleashed the action man in him.
Paragliding, he says, was a surprising experience that "essentially involves jumping off a hill holding on to a plastic bag attached to some string".
But most shocking of all was the skydiving. "There's no doubt that the biggest highlight was being dropped out of a plane twice, two miles up, which was completely unlike what I'd expected."
"I thought it was going to be the most fun, full-on moment - partly because you see all these pictures of people skydiving and they look like they're floating.
"I thought it would be a bit like floating. You get out the plane, there's a rush of air and a skoosh and then you would be floating.
"But, I can report, it is categorically not like floating. You are plummeting. You are going down as fast as the human body could go. You drop about a mile before the parachute is opened."
It all sounds terrifying, but having viewed Britain from angles most of us couldn't contemplate, Marr emerged a fan.
"In terms of sheer, unadulterated fun, this has been a wonderful shoot," he adds. "And it does truly give you a completely different perspective on life in Britain."
Dundee-born Marr went to Loretto School in Musselburgh before heading to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study English. He joined the Scotsman as a trainee junior business reporter in 1981 and left in 1988 after a spell as political editor.
He became London-based, working for a variety of newspapers before hitting television screens as the BBC's distinctive political editor in 2000.
Amidst all of that, he has published five books and more recently evolved from hard news and comment to presenting his talk-based show on Sunday mornings and his documentary series, Andrew Marr's History Of Modern Britain.
Filming is already underway on a prequel to his History Of Modern Britain, Britannia, and a major documentary for BBC Two about evolution - Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
He certainly appears to live up to his workaholic reputation - even if there's a fine line between how much of what he does in the new series is work and how much is sheer personal enjoyment.
"It's been a blast," he says. "Most of us are familiar with being up there from our flights to various holiday destinations. But here we're in smaller planes or helicopters talking with experts who know exactly what they are looking at. The effect is completely different.
"There are so many of us on such a small, historic space the miracle is that we avoid some kind of dramatic national catastrophe," he adds.
"What I hope people take away from this is a sense of how extraordinary it is that we all manage to get along without tipping into utter mayhem and chaos."
Edinburgh Evening News August 2008
But, perhaps more importantly, a nation of television viewers might never have come face to face with the small screen's most unlikely star.
Today Loretto-educated Marr is among the country's best known faces - and pair of ears - in television current affairs, balancing incisive political comment with celebrity interviews as host of a Sunday morning chat show and as a regular contributor to a catalogue of programmes and publications.
Soon he will adopt yet another, slightly more surprising persona: that of fearless action man, as he takes to the heavens on board a variety of flimsy flying machines and wobbly sky-borne apparatus to present his new series, Britain from Above.
In it, he tours the country from hundreds of feet in the air, swooping through the Great Glen on a microlight, plunging to earth tied to a skydiver and trying to keep talking through chattering teeth while strapped to a paraglider.
It's all intended to bring us a new perspective on a familiar landscape. Yet none of it might have come about if it hadn't been for a
romantic crush, way back when the young Andrew Marr was carving himself a name in journalism here in Edinburgh.
"My first job was on The Scotsman," he says. "It was quite some time ago now but I remember leaving to go to London thinking I'd only be going there very briefly. I fully intended to be back in Scotland quickly.
"I was chasing a woman, of course," he reveals. "But when I caught her, I fairly quickly realised that I had been the fish and she was the angler - she didn't waste much time in throwing me back."
The story makes him roar with laughter - it is, he adds, the reason why London is now home and not Edinburgh.
"But I very much feel that Edinburgh is my adoptive home," he adds quickly. "I'm from Dundee, sure, but I went to school at Loretto in Musselburgh and I feel very, very close to Edinburgh."
Which might make viewers of his newest television series wonder why the city he feels such a connection with is rather skirted around as the flying Mr Marr skims the nation's horizon, pointing out geological rarities, historical and industrial landmarks, hills and rugged coastlines.
Throughout the series he whizzes over the Welsh Borders in a hang glider, buzzes once secret military bases in the Midlands and soars over Oxford in a biplane. As for Edinburgh...
"The series is driven by stories about ancient history, geology," he says. "But it's completely non-comprehensive in terms of the places we were able to take in.
"The Scottish sequence ended up being the Great Glen - it's like the San Andreas Fault of Great Britain and Europe, it's a huge geological issue. So we did that.
"We did a lot of London too, obviously because of the size, and we looked at Oxford as an example of how a town has spread over the years."
Certainly, filming Britain From Above is about as far from Marr's typical working environment - a stuffy W12 television studio - as possible.
"I can't remember how many different ways I've been in the air but it's at least two or three different helicopters, four or five different planes, including historic planes from the Thirties, a Tigermoth and a silver Synergy jet - which is, apparently, Kylie's transport of choice," he says.
"On my first day I was strapped in a microlight, which is like a motorised tricycle with wings which goes faster, then dangerously fast until suddenly you are a couple of thousand feet up.
"It's an astonishing feeling. Zipping down the Great Glen very low and seeing it from a bird's eye view, a buzzard's binoculars, was spectacular."
He may not give the immediate impression of a James Bond in waiting - Marr's biggest claim to fame apart from his journalistic skills has been in having a set of distinctive lugs - yet it appears the new series has unleashed the action man in him.
Paragliding, he says, was a surprising experience that "essentially involves jumping off a hill holding on to a plastic bag attached to some string".
But most shocking of all was the skydiving. "There's no doubt that the biggest highlight was being dropped out of a plane twice, two miles up, which was completely unlike what I'd expected."
"I thought it was going to be the most fun, full-on moment - partly because you see all these pictures of people skydiving and they look like they're floating.
"I thought it would be a bit like floating. You get out the plane, there's a rush of air and a skoosh and then you would be floating.
"But, I can report, it is categorically not like floating. You are plummeting. You are going down as fast as the human body could go. You drop about a mile before the parachute is opened."
It all sounds terrifying, but having viewed Britain from angles most of us couldn't contemplate, Marr emerged a fan.
"In terms of sheer, unadulterated fun, this has been a wonderful shoot," he adds. "And it does truly give you a completely different perspective on life in Britain."
Dundee-born Marr went to Loretto School in Musselburgh before heading to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study English. He joined the Scotsman as a trainee junior business reporter in 1981 and left in 1988 after a spell as political editor.
He became London-based, working for a variety of newspapers before hitting television screens as the BBC's distinctive political editor in 2000.
Amidst all of that, he has published five books and more recently evolved from hard news and comment to presenting his talk-based show on Sunday mornings and his documentary series, Andrew Marr's History Of Modern Britain.
Filming is already underway on a prequel to his History Of Modern Britain, Britannia, and a major documentary for BBC Two about evolution - Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
He certainly appears to live up to his workaholic reputation - even if there's a fine line between how much of what he does in the new series is work and how much is sheer personal enjoyment.
"It's been a blast," he says. "Most of us are familiar with being up there from our flights to various holiday destinations. But here we're in smaller planes or helicopters talking with experts who know exactly what they are looking at. The effect is completely different.
"There are so many of us on such a small, historic space the miracle is that we avoid some kind of dramatic national catastrophe," he adds.
"What I hope people take away from this is a sense of how extraordinary it is that we all manage to get along without tipping into utter mayhem and chaos."
Edinburgh Evening News August 2008
PEOPLE: Laying secret ghost to rest
MIND, body and spirit. The ethos that one of Scotland's most prestigious and oldest independent boarding schools was built on, a philosophy that moulded generations of highly educated young students.
Twelve-year-old Don Boyd, smart in his Loretto Junior School uniform of blue serge shorts, open-necked shirt and long red stockings, was about to undergo a particularly "special", secret lesson as he crept towards North Esk Lodge.
This would be a private lesson, the first of many. Just the young boy and his charismatic, popular and - although the schoolboy didn't realise it at the time - predatory, paedophile French teacher.
It was a lesson in life that pioneering 19th century headmaster Dr Hely Hutchinson Almond - whose "mind, body and spirit" values are at the heart of a school that counts Alistair Darling, Andrew Marr, Norman Lamont and racing driver Jim Clark among its past pupils - surely would never have tolerated.
Inside North Esk Lodge was Guy Anthony Ray-Hills' bedroom.
It smelled of gelatine cream, aftershave and semen. It reeked of sex and secrets, of terrible child abuse and broken childhoods.
Within this small bedroom on the top floor of North Esk Lodge, a ten-minute walk from the gates of prim Loretto School at the heart of Musselburgh in the late 50s and early 60s, curious, innocent boys - often deprived of parental affection at a lonely boarding school - were treated to Ray-Hills' full and undivided attention. They were stripped, abused and repeatedly raped.
Boyd kept secret how he became one of the outwardly respectable French tutor's "special friends" for decades. It tainted his life and relationships and hovered quietly in the background as his career in filmmaking led to working with stars like Sir Laurence Olivier, John Hurt, Richard Harris and Dame Helen Mirren, producing iconic movies such as controversial 70s film Scum, writing screenplays and directing.
He blurted his secret out, bizarrely, in an explosive moment after his father's death, when a friend showed off a collection of antique guns, fired one and the blast somehow broke the lock on decades of suppressed anguish.
Today he's back in Edinburgh, just a few miles from where Ray-Hills systematically abused him, to work with the Traverse Theatre and launch a new project which aims to beam live theatre to cinema audiences across the country.
It's also an appropriate location to launch his first novel, Margot's Secrets, with its themes of sexual abuse and mind manipulation, deep- rooted secrets and lives warped by depravity which run brutally close to Boyd's own experiences. So close, that one of his key character's own account of being brutalised by his teacher - even down to the animal nicknames Ray-Hills gave his pupils and the school uniform - could not be anything other than Boyd's own story.
"One of the victims is drawn from my own experience," nods Boyd during a break at a rehearsal room in Leith. "And yes, one of the other characters is the personification of what I imagine my former teacher might become as they enter the adult world away from boarding school.
"He is charming and dangerous. Intelligent, perceptive and a very, very clever manipulator of people."
Here in Edinburgh, so close to that small bedroom, Boyd might be expected to harvest fresh bitterness and anger at his betrayal. "But I'm one of the lucky ones," he stresses. "I can come back to Edinburgh which I feel is my 'home' and be completely forgiving to Loretto. It was a brilliant school educationally, there was the highest order of teaching staff and it gave me the opportunity to learn so much.
"One has to move on. You have to rationalise, otherwise you go around with a scar that never heals, a constant reminder of something that happened a long time ago."
He agrees that ultimately Loretto failed him - and other boys abused by Ray-Hills during the 16 years he taught at the Musselburgh school. But he insists it also introduced him to theatre and cinema, music at the Usher Hall and Shakespeare, laying down credentials for what would become a hugely successful movie career.
His 70s production company, Boyd's Co, was at the forefront of British cinema for a decade, bringing to the screen Alan Clarke's groundbreaking and controversial movie Scum - infamous for its brutality and sex abuse scenes - Derek Jarman's The Tempest, Sex Pistols movie The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and Lindsay Anderson's Look Back in Anger.
Boyd has worked with a string of British talent, from Ray Winstone to Stephen Fry, Kathy Burke and Tilda Swinton. In 1988, he worked with Jarman again (pictured below) on War Requiem, Laurence Olivier's final film.
Yet while his career flourished - he's been described as a "one-man film industry" - Boyd's private life and marriage was in turmoil. Events at Loretto between 1958 and 1965 lurked in the background, repressed but the catalyst for his own adulterous and duplicitous adult behaviour.
Boyd was born in Nairn and was ten when he was sent to Loretto while his parents lived in Africa. "School was horrendously brutal but I thought that was normal and life was like that," he recalls.
The abuse began after months of careful, cynical grooming by his tutor when he was 12. It continued throughout his year as head boy at the prep school and into senior school. As he prepared to leave Loretto as a teenager, Ray-Hills accompanied Boyd on holiday to Austria where the abuse continued. "I was ashamed and couldn't cope," Boyd recalls. "Then came hiding it. The impact on your life that hiding something like that has is huge. It caused a lot of turmoil and crises."
When he finally revealed his secret in 2001, Loretto acted immediately, contacting everyone who'd ever been taught by Ray-Hills. "There were 35 letters back from people saying similar stuff had happened to them," says Boyd. One man claimed the abuse had driven him to attempt suicide.
Ray-Hills, then in his late 70s, was charged with a string of sex offences but the case was dropped on grounds of his ill-health. The shame of being "outed" for years of abuse would, Boyd believes, have been enough of a punishment, jail a given if he had stood trial.
Ray-Hills is now dead. "Nothing was ever done to him while he was a teacher," Boyd recalls. "He left Loretto and it was brushed under the carpet in a way that must have been done by lots of organisations at the time - the Catholic Church, public schools. But I don't really hold Loretto to blame."
Today it's in Boyd's past, but curiously events from 50 years ago could also feature in his future too.
His X-rated psychological thriller, Margot's Secrets - based around an American psychotherapist in Barcelona's ex-pat community where everyone has a sexual history they'd rather keep hidden - is already the subject of discussions between his publishers and American film producers as potential movie material.
Although he insists it is fiction and not memoirs, drawing on elements of his own story and unravelling tracts of Ray-Hills' make-up for his characters has been a cathartic experience, Boyd adds.
"I suppose integrating Ray-Hills in a book as a character has been my way of laying the ghost to rest."
Teacher never stood trial to face charges
Guy Anthony Ray-Hills taught at Loretto School for 16 years and later at Cheam, Prince Charles's former school.
Don Boyd's 2001 abuse revelation sparked a police investigation after another former Loretto pupil - a Scottish university professor - complained he too had been abused.
Ray-Hills left the Musselburgh school in 1968 and was living in retirement in Twickenham when the allegations surfaced.
He was later charged with sexual offences against two boys, then aged 11 and 15, which allegedly took place 40 years earlier.
The case was due to be heard in summer 2003 but dropped because of the accused's ill-health. The Crown Office confirmed at the time that the case would not be "re-raised".
Edinburgh Evening News, August 2010
PEOPLE: A novel return to childhood locations
THERE'S just one word to describe the scene outside author Maggie O'Farrell's London home - "dreich".
But she adds: "I was just talking to my mum on the phone and she says the weather in North Berwick is absolutely beautiful."
There is fondness in her voice as she mentions her home town, but it's a very long way from North Berwick to the Big Smoke in more ways than just miles.
Maggie, once a slightly awkward 12-year-old "outsider" at North Berwick school, is now among Britain's best-selling authors, an award-winning novelist whose three books have all achieved critical acclaim and blockbusting sales.
Her life, which once revolved around, the slightly claustrophobic community of an East Lothian seaside resort and summers spent at the outdoor swimming pool, now takes her to book signings, hob-nobbing - she stresses that it's only very occasionally - with the London glitterati and mingling with fellow household-name writers.
All of that and she's a dab hand at changing nappies, too. Maggie added that particular string to her bow 19 months ago, when son Saul entered the world. She very quickly discovered her newborn had his own agenda - one that doesn't sound conducive to allowing mum time to create best-selling novels.
"He was a horrific sleeper," she confesses. "He's good now - asleep by 7.30pm - but for the first six months he just didn't sleep. I found it really, really hard."
Just as well she'd already finished her third and latest novel, The Distance Between Us. Published last January to the same kind of praise that accompanied her first two works, it provided her growing legion of fans with another tense, slightly dark and highly evocative page-turner set in a small Scottish village.
Like its predecessors, the Betty Trask Award-winning After You'd Gone and her second novel, My Lover's Lover, it delves into the complexities of modern relationships, played out against locations anyone with even a vague knowledge of life in the Lothians would find familiar - such as the quaint Italian cafe Maggie puts at the heart of the novel that could only really have been inspired by Luca's in Musselburgh.
She is clearly keen to put her little corner of Lothian on the literary map. After You'd Gone was partly set in North Berwick and followed the twisting and turning relationships of a middle sister with a literary background who heads to London and falls in love with a Jewish man.
None of which is exactly a million miles away from Maggie's own life. Nor is the experience of another of her characters in The Distance Between Us, who falls into a coma after a mysterious brain virus: Maggie was just eight when she was struck by just such a virus which kept her off school for a year and which, even today, can affect her balance.
Drawing on such familiar territory is only natural, she says, but is quick to point out that her books are not autobiographical. Writing out her own life would, she says, be boring. That said, she admits she can't escape the impact her life and her home have on her writing. "As a teenager we are at our most susceptible to influences, but I couldn't live today in a place like North Berwick," she says.
"Being a teenager in North Berwick was very frustrating.
"At every opportunity I'd be on the train to Waverley. When I was a teenager, everyone knew you, knew what you were doing. You couldn't walk down a street without bumping into someone who knew your mum."
Now 32, she is a self-confessed "city girl" having arrived in London ten years ago via Hong Kong and a series of dead-end jobs with the intention of staying for just a year.
Yet even now, she regards North Berwick as her real home, returning every couple of months to visit her parents and her two sisters.
THERE were other places she could have chosen to regard as "home". Born in Northern Ireland in 1972, her family later moved to Wales before her father Patrick's work as an economics lecturer took the family - mum Susan, Maggie and her sisters, Catherine and Bridget, to North Berwick.
"I was about 12 years old," Maggie recalls. "It wasn't that easy settling in and I had been a bit upset to leave our home just outside Cardiff. In retrospect, it was good we moved - the comprehensive in Wales was terrifying! I'd probably have ended up pregnant at 15 or something."
She describes herself as something of an outsider at school, a fan of indie band The Cure who spent much of her spare time shut in her bedroom reading challenging works by Albert Camus and writing the diaries she started at the age of six and still keeps today.
So perhaps it shouldn't have been too surprising to anyone when she won a place at Cambridge reading English. She says: "I didn't really like it. It was a bit of a shock to the system - going from a small comprehensive school in North Berwick to Cambridge. I messed up my finals and I thought I'd be in big trouble at home."
She was in more trouble with her family when she suddenly decided to travel to Hong Kong to teach English. "My mother was really angry with me - I just got on a plane and went out there. I'd never really been anywhere - my family are not big travellers, they've hardly left Scotland. I thought I'd go to Hong Kong because at least a lot of people there would speak English."
It was there she found inspiration for her first book. "I got the idea for After You'd Gone there. That said, I didn't start writing properly for another two years, until a boyfriend's mother gave me a computer. I'd never used a computer before but as soon as I had it, I was flying away."
The result was her first novel, described by enthusiastic critics as "beautifully constructed, unashamedly passionate" and "a first-class trip across the borders of the mind". Others talk of her special ability to combine emotional, contemporary fiction which is both literary and commercial - several levels above popular "chick lit" - appealing to broad generations of readers.
Not that Maggie tries to pay too much attention to what the critics say.
She says: "I read some reviews after the first book, but now I just put my head in the sand. When I read them then sat down to write, there'd be these little voices in my head saying: 'Maggie O'Farrell writes this' or 'is concerned with that'. I found myself writing to fit what they'd said. "I'm also chicken," she laughs. "My boyfriend reads them and he gives me a rough idea if they are good, bad or really rubbish!"
The good ones have far outweighed the bad. And it's not surprising that Maggie's work, with its focus on tangled relationships, dark plots - the genre is described as domestic gothic - spanning often far flung locations, has attracted the interest of film-makers.
After You'd Gone has just been snapped up by the makers of Calendar Girls, which starred Helen Mirren and Julie Walters.
Maggie has no interest, however, in "doing a JK" and retaining control of her characters. "They could well cast someone I think is wrong for a major part and, yes, you do often see films which bear no similarity to the book, but there's no point beating yourself up about it.
"Sometimes you're asked if you want to write the script but I can't imagine anything worse. I'd cut off my hand before I went back to it."
Instead she prefers to look to the future. Despite sleepless nights thanks to the son she has with fellow author William Sutcliffe - and her thoughts turning to having another - Maggie has still managed to complete her fourth novel.
"The first draft is finished but I have a superstition - I like to put it away for a couple of months and ignore it, forget about it for a bit," she explains. "It helps to give it a bit of distance, then I go back and often just rip it to pieces."
And what can Maggie's fans expect from her fourth novel? Again, it seems there is no escaping her Scottish roots.
"It's set in Edinburgh," she reveals. "And it's partly historical. But that's all I'm saying.
"Let's just say that talking about it too soon is another one of my superstitions."
Edinburgh evening News Feb 2005
PEOPLE: Book pair's Mainstream success
.
IN another life, Bill Campbell and sidekick Peter Mackenzie might have been tabloid newspapermen, foot-in-the-door types with a nose for a saleable story and a gift for teasing out the line that would grab the front page headlines.
Celebrities, sportsmen, curious new age health quacks, hard men criminals and middle aged women with tearful tales of childhood hardship . . . Bill would be the tough one, urging them to reveal a little bit more; Peter a bit more reserved, with the chequebook at hand - strictly to cover expenses, of course.
Certainly the books crammed on the shelves in their boardroom scream tabloid headline-style titles. There's Jihad! and Mr Nasty; and there's Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes, and Saved By My Face. For the sports fans, there's Toon Army side by side with Forever Everton, real life tales from Sir Alex Ferguson, Gavin Hastings, Shane Warne and dozens more.
But while they may talk the talk of the tabloids, it's the world of publishing, brimming with plummy accents and long lunches at The Ivy, which the straight-talking duo have brazenly shouldered their way into.
Two thousand-plus books on, the Edinburgh-based business they founded exactly 30 years ago on two GBP 1000 bank loans - "We said it was for home improvements," grins Bill - is thriving.
Today Mainstream Publishing has a generous back catalogue of titles brimming with tabloid-style tales, factual accounts of hardship, war-time Boys' Own epics and memoirs of sporting glories. It now occupies a three-storey block in Albany Street.
It's a long way from the days when Bill's Barony Street flat was its publishing HQ, when piles of books covered every spare bit of space, including beneath Bill's bed, and the likes of Lord James Douglas Hamilton could be found crouched on the floor wrapping up the books they had just lovingly written ready to be sent off to the bookshops.
Having been conceived against a background of social change and national pride courtesy of the ultimately doomed devolution debate, Mainstream went on to seize sport in the Eighties, self help in the Nineties, real life crime in the Noughties and, most recently, tear-jerking "misery memoirs".
Sniffing out a good story and then exploiting the niche in the market has been their forte . . . and no-one's more proud of that than the pair dubbed the "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" of Scottish publishing.
Today Bill sits in the boardroom, casual in a black sweater with a shiny black Rado watch gleaming on his wrist, books piled floor to ceiling across three walls. That he's been 30 years in the job surprises even him - it's passed by so quickly.
"Many people would give their eye teeth to do what we do, which is a job that brings enormous satisfaction and, if you get it right, can make you decent money," he reflects.
"But the beauty of it all is you end up making friends with some genuinely interesting people, each of them important in their own way, whether they are politicians, princes or paupers."
Peter nods in agreement. While Bill has the greater creative spark in their partnership, Peter has kept Mainstream afloat with a keen business mind that has tackled the legal issues, administrative tangles and deftly sorted out the accounts - even when they didn't amount to much.
For while Mainstream is now a GBP 4 million business, half of it nestling under the umbrella of London-based Random House, back in the days when the notion of launching a publishing house first crossed Bill's mind, the small matter of money was well down the list the priorities.
Bill, born in Glasgow and raised in Kilmarnock, came to the Capital in 1969 to study history at Edinburgh University. Peter arrived from Strathpeffer to wade through economics and accountancy. They might never have met had it not been for a joint interest in the student magazine and later Edinburgh University Student Publications Board.
The board branched into publishing books including Alternative Edinburgh - penned by Bill, current PM Gordon Brown and Barry Wright, who would go on to launch Regular Music. It was regarded as controversial for its student take on how to save precious pennies - including the suggestion that students avoid the pay-as-you-go toilets at Waverley Station and instead nip into the Balmoral Hotel via a services lift located on the railway station forecourt.
Not surprising then, that when Bill first mooted the idea of running a publishing house, Peter wasn't exactly biting his hand off.
"I was thinking 'What a stupid idea'," he laughs. "We had no idea of what it involved, never mind that we had no money. It was lunacy."
Still, Mainstream was launched from Bill's humble flat using those home improvement bank loans.
Their break came when a contact at Edinburgh publisher Canongate suggested they might be interested in a book it had rejected. Incredibly, it was previously unpublished diaries of Robert Louis Stevenson's journey through France - The Cevennes Journal became a Mainstream international hit.
Still, times were hard for the fledgling publishers. "We had to pack every book ourselves and carry armfuls of parcels to the post office and put the stamps on. We had to load up the car and drive around the whole of Britain to independent bookshops in the hope they'd take some books," recalls Peter. "We typed every invoice and every statement ourselves and then had to phone and harass people to pay us."
They went on to turn down Ian Rankin - his fictional cop stories didn't quite fit the factual niche Mainstream was carving - but there were scores of successes to come.
By the time the business had moved to an office at East Thistle Street Lane and then Albany Street, it was scoring on the back of a string of sports-themed factual books.
"It was 1986," recalls Bill, " a real eye-opener. Aberdeen had won the UEFA Cup and we did Light in the North with Alex Ferguson.
"There was a signing session in John Menzies in Aberdeen. They had to call in the mounted police for crowd control. We both thought 'oh, we're on to something in this' and we exploited it pretty ruthlessly."
But as football players' earnings soared and clubs curtailed their freedom to speak out in controversial autobiographies, Mainstream's attention turned to other areas.
There followed gritty real life tales of crime, war exploits and diplomatic incidents thanks to Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan whose biography sent letters of protest flying between the Foreign Office and Mainstream.
Most recently, however, it has been the niche market of tear-jerking tales inspired by the likes of Angela's Ashes that has kept the catalogue bubbling along.
"I call it guerrilla publishing," says Bill. "We see an area, move in and fill it as quickly as possible."
As for the moral questions over some of Mainstream's books - they have flirted with controversy with books about football hooligans and the story of Glasgow crime lord Paul Ferris - Bill is unfazed.
"We reflect society," he shrugs. "I don't have a moral dilemma with it."
But amid all the upwards trajectories on the bestsellers list and smiling book launches - Aussie cricket legend Shane Warne is in London as the pair speak, launching his Mainstream autobiography - Bill and Peter have also had their share of sticky moments too.
On the shelf behind Bill's desk is that copy of Jihad! - a Mainstream success story if you skim over the embarrassing chapter that involved the author being accused of having made up a key element of his own story.
Then there was the time in 1999 when they had to pay out around GBP 22,000 after one author was found guilty of a "spectacular and sustained act of plagiarism". James Mackay's biography of John Paul Jones, the Scottish-born founder of the United States navy, was withdrawn amid claims he had copied material from another book. Then there was the family furore surrounding Don't Ever Tell, a disturbing memoir involving sex abuse and neglect. Cue the author's family, and claims that the harrowing account was, in parts, fictional.
Bill's smile fades and he shakes his head. "I'd rather not go into that. There's a lot of family issues involved," he sighs. "We are strong in our investigations of these kinds of stories."
With that, they look forward to the future. What does it hold for Mainstream?
Next year come books from Tour de France hero Lance Armstrong, a real-life heartbreaking tale of a soldier burned while stationed in Afghanistan, a dissection of Kate Middleton, and Being British, a book penned by celebrity authors on what it means to be a Brit, with contributions from JK Rowling and their old university mate, Gordon Brown.
"The future is to go on, stronger than before," says Bill. "I suppose ultimately the hope is that long after Peter and I are gone, there will still be a Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh-based and still a forward-thinking company."
SELLING THEIR STORIES
AMONG the biggest successes for Mainstream Publishing, launched in 1978 by Bill Campbell and Peter Mackenzie, was its decision to publish the "true story" of William Wallace after Bill spotted a small news story about plans to release a movie starring Mel Gibson called Braveheart.
And among the tabloid-style crime stories and misery memoirs have been a string of more serious books. Scottish Art 1460-1990 cost the company GBP 100,000 to produce but paid off massively. Scotland's Shame, a book that detailed religious bigotry, opened a debate that has raged for years and still continues to fuel discussion.
Among the most controversial was The Big Breach by former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson, which sparked a dispute with the Government over the proceeds.
But it's the human stories that have moved Mainstream's founders most. Among them is the story of Eugenie Fraser from Morningside - the daughter of a Dundee woman who married a Russian, she wrote about growing up during the Russian Revolution.
Another is Henry Allingham, a 112-year-old veteran of the Great War, whose memoirs have just been published.
"When you get that collision of creativity with genuine interest and commercial value, there's a huge buzz," says Bill.
IN another life, Bill Campbell and sidekick Peter Mackenzie might have been tabloid newspapermen, foot-in-the-door types with a nose for a saleable story and a gift for teasing out the line that would grab the front page headlines.
Celebrities, sportsmen, curious new age health quacks, hard men criminals and middle aged women with tearful tales of childhood hardship . . . Bill would be the tough one, urging them to reveal a little bit more; Peter a bit more reserved, with the chequebook at hand - strictly to cover expenses, of course.
Certainly the books crammed on the shelves in their boardroom scream tabloid headline-style titles. There's Jihad! and Mr Nasty; and there's Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes, and Saved By My Face. For the sports fans, there's Toon Army side by side with Forever Everton, real life tales from Sir Alex Ferguson, Gavin Hastings, Shane Warne and dozens more.
But while they may talk the talk of the tabloids, it's the world of publishing, brimming with plummy accents and long lunches at The Ivy, which the straight-talking duo have brazenly shouldered their way into.
Two thousand-plus books on, the Edinburgh-based business they founded exactly 30 years ago on two GBP 1000 bank loans - "We said it was for home improvements," grins Bill - is thriving.
Today Mainstream Publishing has a generous back catalogue of titles brimming with tabloid-style tales, factual accounts of hardship, war-time Boys' Own epics and memoirs of sporting glories. It now occupies a three-storey block in Albany Street.
It's a long way from the days when Bill's Barony Street flat was its publishing HQ, when piles of books covered every spare bit of space, including beneath Bill's bed, and the likes of Lord James Douglas Hamilton could be found crouched on the floor wrapping up the books they had just lovingly written ready to be sent off to the bookshops.
Having been conceived against a background of social change and national pride courtesy of the ultimately doomed devolution debate, Mainstream went on to seize sport in the Eighties, self help in the Nineties, real life crime in the Noughties and, most recently, tear-jerking "misery memoirs".
Sniffing out a good story and then exploiting the niche in the market has been their forte . . . and no-one's more proud of that than the pair dubbed the "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" of Scottish publishing.
Today Bill sits in the boardroom, casual in a black sweater with a shiny black Rado watch gleaming on his wrist, books piled floor to ceiling across three walls. That he's been 30 years in the job surprises even him - it's passed by so quickly.
"Many people would give their eye teeth to do what we do, which is a job that brings enormous satisfaction and, if you get it right, can make you decent money," he reflects.
"But the beauty of it all is you end up making friends with some genuinely interesting people, each of them important in their own way, whether they are politicians, princes or paupers."
Peter nods in agreement. While Bill has the greater creative spark in their partnership, Peter has kept Mainstream afloat with a keen business mind that has tackled the legal issues, administrative tangles and deftly sorted out the accounts - even when they didn't amount to much.
For while Mainstream is now a GBP 4 million business, half of it nestling under the umbrella of London-based Random House, back in the days when the notion of launching a publishing house first crossed Bill's mind, the small matter of money was well down the list the priorities.
Bill, born in Glasgow and raised in Kilmarnock, came to the Capital in 1969 to study history at Edinburgh University. Peter arrived from Strathpeffer to wade through economics and accountancy. They might never have met had it not been for a joint interest in the student magazine and later Edinburgh University Student Publications Board.
The board branched into publishing books including Alternative Edinburgh - penned by Bill, current PM Gordon Brown and Barry Wright, who would go on to launch Regular Music. It was regarded as controversial for its student take on how to save precious pennies - including the suggestion that students avoid the pay-as-you-go toilets at Waverley Station and instead nip into the Balmoral Hotel via a services lift located on the railway station forecourt.
Not surprising then, that when Bill first mooted the idea of running a publishing house, Peter wasn't exactly biting his hand off.
"I was thinking 'What a stupid idea'," he laughs. "We had no idea of what it involved, never mind that we had no money. It was lunacy."
Still, Mainstream was launched from Bill's humble flat using those home improvement bank loans.
Their break came when a contact at Edinburgh publisher Canongate suggested they might be interested in a book it had rejected. Incredibly, it was previously unpublished diaries of Robert Louis Stevenson's journey through France - The Cevennes Journal became a Mainstream international hit.
Still, times were hard for the fledgling publishers. "We had to pack every book ourselves and carry armfuls of parcels to the post office and put the stamps on. We had to load up the car and drive around the whole of Britain to independent bookshops in the hope they'd take some books," recalls Peter. "We typed every invoice and every statement ourselves and then had to phone and harass people to pay us."
They went on to turn down Ian Rankin - his fictional cop stories didn't quite fit the factual niche Mainstream was carving - but there were scores of successes to come.
By the time the business had moved to an office at East Thistle Street Lane and then Albany Street, it was scoring on the back of a string of sports-themed factual books.
"It was 1986," recalls Bill, " a real eye-opener. Aberdeen had won the UEFA Cup and we did Light in the North with Alex Ferguson.
"There was a signing session in John Menzies in Aberdeen. They had to call in the mounted police for crowd control. We both thought 'oh, we're on to something in this' and we exploited it pretty ruthlessly."
But as football players' earnings soared and clubs curtailed their freedom to speak out in controversial autobiographies, Mainstream's attention turned to other areas.
There followed gritty real life tales of crime, war exploits and diplomatic incidents thanks to Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan whose biography sent letters of protest flying between the Foreign Office and Mainstream.
Most recently, however, it has been the niche market of tear-jerking tales inspired by the likes of Angela's Ashes that has kept the catalogue bubbling along.
"I call it guerrilla publishing," says Bill. "We see an area, move in and fill it as quickly as possible."
As for the moral questions over some of Mainstream's books - they have flirted with controversy with books about football hooligans and the story of Glasgow crime lord Paul Ferris - Bill is unfazed.
"We reflect society," he shrugs. "I don't have a moral dilemma with it."
But amid all the upwards trajectories on the bestsellers list and smiling book launches - Aussie cricket legend Shane Warne is in London as the pair speak, launching his Mainstream autobiography - Bill and Peter have also had their share of sticky moments too.
On the shelf behind Bill's desk is that copy of Jihad! - a Mainstream success story if you skim over the embarrassing chapter that involved the author being accused of having made up a key element of his own story.
Then there was the time in 1999 when they had to pay out around GBP 22,000 after one author was found guilty of a "spectacular and sustained act of plagiarism". James Mackay's biography of John Paul Jones, the Scottish-born founder of the United States navy, was withdrawn amid claims he had copied material from another book. Then there was the family furore surrounding Don't Ever Tell, a disturbing memoir involving sex abuse and neglect. Cue the author's family, and claims that the harrowing account was, in parts, fictional.
Bill's smile fades and he shakes his head. "I'd rather not go into that. There's a lot of family issues involved," he sighs. "We are strong in our investigations of these kinds of stories."
With that, they look forward to the future. What does it hold for Mainstream?
Next year come books from Tour de France hero Lance Armstrong, a real-life heartbreaking tale of a soldier burned while stationed in Afghanistan, a dissection of Kate Middleton, and Being British, a book penned by celebrity authors on what it means to be a Brit, with contributions from JK Rowling and their old university mate, Gordon Brown.
"The future is to go on, stronger than before," says Bill. "I suppose ultimately the hope is that long after Peter and I are gone, there will still be a Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh-based and still a forward-thinking company."
SELLING THEIR STORIES
AMONG the biggest successes for Mainstream Publishing, launched in 1978 by Bill Campbell and Peter Mackenzie, was its decision to publish the "true story" of William Wallace after Bill spotted a small news story about plans to release a movie starring Mel Gibson called Braveheart.
And among the tabloid-style crime stories and misery memoirs have been a string of more serious books. Scottish Art 1460-1990 cost the company GBP 100,000 to produce but paid off massively. Scotland's Shame, a book that detailed religious bigotry, opened a debate that has raged for years and still continues to fuel discussion.
Among the most controversial was The Big Breach by former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson, which sparked a dispute with the Government over the proceeds.
But it's the human stories that have moved Mainstream's founders most. Among them is the story of Eugenie Fraser from Morningside - the daughter of a Dundee woman who married a Russian, she wrote about growing up during the Russian Revolution.
Another is Henry Allingham, a 112-year-old veteran of the Great War, whose memoirs have just been published.
"When you get that collision of creativity with genuine interest and commercial value, there's a huge buzz," says Bill.
PEOPLE: Writer who juggles life and death.
By rights, crime writer Paul Johnston - a man who has dwelt more than most on death, and gruesome death at that - shouldn't really be cracking jokes.
Yet here he is, chuckling away at his own misfortune, a little angry but also utterly determined to make the most of what life's just handed him.
"A tennis ball," he snorts, "the tumour they found in my bowel was the size of a tennis ball. Quite what Roger Federer was doing hitting an ace up there, I have no idea."
He roars with laughter but while he can joke about it now, the best-selling Edinburgh-born, Athens-based author wasn't always quite so laid-back.
He had just been told he had passed the 'five years clear' stage from an entirely separate cancer which cost him a kidney and, in true 'kick them when they're down' style, coincided with him being ditched by his publishers, when he realised he wasn't feeling as good as he should.
He put it down to the stress of wondering whether he would pass his cancer check-up combined with the imminent birth of his first son, but of course, it wasn't.
"It was literally the day after I'd been signed off and told I was clear of cancer," he recalls. "I began to feel not that great, really tired. I was getting pains in the bowel area that weren't going away.
"The doctors in Athens fairly rapidly realised there was a tumour the size of a tennis ball lurking in there. You've got to laugh really."
How such a sizeable malignant growth slipped through just as the creator of a string of books famous for their raw and grizzly death scenes - he is best known for his Quint Dalrymple series set in a futuristic independent state of Edinburgh - was undergoing stringent cancer checks is a medical conundrum.
It didn't help that his first encounter with the condition, a growth beneath his kidneys, also went undetected for much longer than it probably should have.
"Subconsciously, your body knows there is something going seriously wrong," he reflects. "You don't know what, so you rely on the doctors to tell you. I relied on the NHS but they didn't see it until very late.
"It had been there a long time, in soft tissue and hard to spot. When they finally opened me up to get it, the thing virtually sat up and barked at them like something from Alien. It was stage three and very, very aggressive."
That news floored him and the double sucker-punch from his publishers and the rapid departure of his agent didn't exactly help. It might all have led other authors to throw their PC out of the window. Instead, it set him to work.
In breathtaking time the crime novelist who blew up his former school, Fettes, in his first highly acclaimed book, Body Politic, had created a new bitter and twisted central figure for a book driven by revenge and played out against a violent backdrop of serial killings.
The result was The Death List, acclaimed by Ian Rankin as "a classy serial killer thriller' - and Paul has returned the compliment by praising his fellow city crime writer's work - and fellow Scottish novelist Kate Atkinson as "a modern revenge tragedy with even more blood, gore and ingenious twists". Better still, it has sold more than 30,000 copies.
Not bad going considering Johnston hammered it out in a fury in just over a month, his most violent book taking shape in a massive outpouring of 5000 words a day, driven by his battered emotional state.
Having introduced hacked-off crime writer Matt Wells in that novel - and personally vented his spleen in the process - Johnston is back for more. Last month he unveiled the second book in his Wells series, The Soul Collector.
"The whole point of this series is revenge," explains Johnston, 51, back in Edinburgh for a string of personal book store appearances and to catch up with his father, crime novelist Ronald Johnston.
"It's fair to say that after the first cancer and being dumped by my publishers there was a fair amount of anger floating around. Bitterness is a bad thing, it's unavoidable, it's part of the human state but it's a bit toxic.
"So I got some of that out in my first book which seems to have done the trick.
"Revenge is such an interesting emotion because we all feel it at some time, though possibly not to the murderous extent that I did."
Blood and gore, human passions and their frailties have long been part of Johnston's make up. He was just seven years old when he picked up a copy of The Odyssey from his father's bookshelves and became instantly hooked on fabulous tales of life, death, love and war.
"It opened at the episode where Cyclops sharpens a stick and then pokes it in someone's eye - exactly what a seven year old boy wants to read!," he gleefully recalls.
"I started nagging my dad from then on, I wanted to know more. Eventually he said 'OK, go to Fettes'. After a week there I realised what I'd let myself into and probably bankrupted my poor old dad at the same time."
He recalls a youthful Tony Blair a few years above him in the school play displaying a flair for acting, but he struggled to embrace the ideology of public school. Hence its explosive fictional demise in his first novel.
His love of Ancient Greece and the Classics endured though. He studied at Oxford and worked for shipping companies in London and Belgium before moving to Greece in 1987 for a string of jobs, among them one as a "ham-fisted tourist guide".
Along with his Quint Dalrymple series and the newer Matt Wells books are a trio of Greek-based books featuring his private eye Alex Mavros.
Amid it all, he divides his time between Athens - where he lives with second wife, Roula, and their children, Maggie and Alexander - and Edinburgh.
Today, he is still undergoing chemotherapy for his latest cancer but the bitterness and anger seems to have subsided at last.
Things are looking up professionally too. He has a new upbeat publisher and a new series of books on the shelves, while talks to develop The Body Politic into a movie have crossed the vital hurdle of securing finance.
It's not been easy though. "It's like a grieving procedure," he explains.
"There's anger, denial, melancholy, bitterness and acceptance. There have been times when I've wondered 'Is this it?.
"As a crime writer, I've juggled constantly with life and death in my imagination.
"Coming face to face with the real thing... well, it does make you reconsider a lot of things.
"But now," he adds with a smile, "I'm just really very happy."
The Soul Collector is out now, published by Mira Books.
ODYSSEY OF A MAN WITH THE WRITE STUFF
PAUL JOHNSTON was born in Edinburgh in 1957. His father Ronald was a successful thriller writer.
After Fettes, Paul studied ancient and modern Greek at Oxford University. He left in 1982 and began working for shipping companies in London and Belgium.
He moved to Greece in 1987, and worked on a newspaper, in shipping and then taught English. His daughter Silje was born in 1988. He started writing seriously in 1989, when he went to live on the small Aegean island of Antiparos.
The author returned to Edinburgh to study in 1995. His first novel, Body Politic, won the Creasey Dagger for best first crime novel of 1997. Since then he's written and published another nine books.
In 2005, he married his second wife, Roula, a Greek civil servant. Their daughter Maggie was born in Athens in January 2006 and their son Alexander in January 2008.
His chemotherapy is due to continue until November.
PEOPLE: There's been a murder... in fact, quite a few.
HE was the rough, tough-talking Glaswegian copper, a fiery lawman cleaning up crime in No Mean City.
Twenty-five years after he hit television screens, it's impossible to imagine Taggart being set anywhere other than in the city streets, grim housing estates and bustling cop shops that line the River Clyde.
Yet creator Glenn Chandler, who grew up in Meadowbank, whose first jobs involved silver service at what is now the Balmoral Hotel and behind a counter in Jenners, thought differently.
"I rather hoped it would be set in Edinburgh," he admits, thinking back a quarter of a century to when he was first approached to create the one-off police show that would evolve into a national phenomenon.
"I was pretty quickly slapped down by the powers at STV at the time. I was told they couldn't possibly film it in Edinburgh because everyone was based in Glasgow and they weren't prepared to meet the expense of driving the production team through from Glasgow and back again.
"So there I was, an Edinburgh boy living in Hertfordshire having to write about a Glasgow policeman," he laughs. "So I'm afraid it meant something of a crash course in west-coast culture.
"But I suppose it's just as well it worked out that way," he adds with a wry smile, "or poor Ian Rankin might have ended up out of a job."
It's hard to imagine now, but if Taggart had worked in the Capital, there wouldn't have been a big empty space marked "Edinburgh detective" waiting to be filled when Rankin started to write.
Of course, what started as a three-part murder mystery tale called Killer and based around a gritty Glasgow cop is now television history.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the show - it is the world's longest continually running cop show, seen in more than 80 countries from Iceland to New Zealand and there's no sign of a let up: ITV recently commissioned ten new programmes. Not bad for a one-off plot which Glenn, now 57, hurriedly researched by driving around Glasgow in the back of a black cab and mingling with punters in the city's pubs.
"To be honest, I don't really know if it would have worked as well if it had been set in Edinburgh," he concedes.
"Taggart has this raw edge to it and Glasgow is much more suited to the kind of Taggart formula than Edinburgh. "So it didn't work out too badly."
In fact, it was a dream come true for Glenn, who suddenly found himself catapulted from writing plays for small London theatres to the high pressure demands of churning out quality television scripts to tight filming deadlines.
And it was a world away from his first foray into writing - an end of term school play which introduced him to his first experience of censorship.
"It was my final year at the Royal High," he remembers. "We did a satirical production looking back on the past term.
"During the first show we did a song about a master's sexual predilection and I was pretty quickly sent straight to the rector's office and told to cut verses with immediate effect.
"It was my first lesson in the fine line between satire and libel."
Writingwas his vocation despite a family gene pool that suggested his talents might lie in music. Born at home in Meadowbank, his mother Joan was an amateur opera singer and his father Andrew played piano and accordion with the Al Bertino Swing Band, a dance hall ensemble. His maternal grandfather had music in his bones too, he was frontman in Frank Moy and his Orchestra, a regular fixture at hotels around the city.
The young Glenn was encouraged to practise his scales at the piano, but it was writing and theatre that were his passion.
"But I didn't know how to go about being a writer," he remembers, "so I took a succession of jobs instead."
There were spells as a commis waiter at the North British Hotel - now the Balmoral - until he spilled tea in Oscar-nominated actor Laurence Harvey's lap. Then he worked on the floor in Woolworths and Jenners before he finally boarded a train at Waverley for London. He ended up in Notting Hill writing radio plays which more often than not were returned with rejection letters and later short dramas for London fringe theatres.
One of them - Moonlight Across the Heather, a tale of murder set around a lonely mountain bothy - caught the attention of STV's controller of drama at the time, Robert Love. Soon the pair were meeting over a table in Covent Garden to discuss the possibilities of a Scottish-based crime drama.
"I already had an interest in murder," he explains. "I had a commission from Granada Television to write three episodes of daytime drama Crown Court and I had started to go to murder trials at the Old Bailey to listen to what people can do to each other.
"So wWhen Robert Love suggested working on a whodunit about a Glasgow detective, my first thought was 'Wow!'"
There was a similar reaction when he met Mark McManus, the actor who would become Taggart and who he immediately realised was perfect for the part. The character's name, he admits, was plucked from a gravestone in a Glasgow cemetery. Glenn's involvement with the programme spanned 1983 to 1998, evolving throughout the difficult period of McManus's sudden death and the introduction of new characters - including another Edinburgh presence in the form of actor John Michie, who plays DI Robbie Ross.
Soon he will return home to Edinburgh from his Hertfordshire base, to take part for the first time in the Festival. It's a journey back to his roots that is both personal and professional. "I'm coming full circle," he grins. "I'm coming home and I'm back in theatre."
He is bringing two plays, one - Boys of the Empire - is a political satire set in a 1920s boarding school which draws on today's Iraq conflict and Britain's historic role in the area in the aftermath of the First World War. It was inspired, he explains, by a chance discovery of boys' comics in an antique shop. "These comics were all 'ripping' and 'spiffing'. I found a Boy's Own one with an incredibly patronising tale about these upper class public school-types dealing with the 'foreigners' in Iraq. Of course, it all has these parallels with what is happening today. So the play makes a sly political point about what is happening now."
He takes the role of producer for the other play, What's Wrong With Angry, a comedy-drama based in 1992 at a time when debate raged over lowering the age of homosexual consent from 21.
Yet while he may have moved on, there's no escaping the gritty Glasgow cop, whose gruff mannerisms and catchphrase 'there's been a murrderr' - even though Glenn insists the line was never written in any episode - spawned dozens of imitators.
"I never miss it," he admits. "It's terrific entertainment - my only gripe is that at an hour, it's not long enough. There's never any danger of running out of stories either," he adds, casting an eye around his library, stuffed full of books based on real life crimes. "Because really, there's no limit to how badly we can all manage to treat each other."
Tickets are on sale now for Boys of the Empire and What's Wrong with Angry, both at C venue 34, Chambers Street from July 30 until August 25, priced GBP 8.50-GBP 11.50. For further information and tickets go to www.cthefestival.com / 0845-260 1234 or www.edfringe.com
PILOT SHOW 'KILLER' REALLY TOOK OFF
GLENN CHANDLER wrote every episode of Taggart for 11 years, starting with the pilot show, Killer.
The twists and turns of the original episode were so successful that none of the actors reading for parts correctly guessed the identity of the murderer.
It was a hugely successful format that catapulted the series to the top of the viewers' rating charts.
The most viewers - 18.3 million - tuned in for Violent Deaths in 1992, a story of a student with a crush on a teacher who witnesses an apparent murder while spying on her.
Two years later Taggart, Mark McManus, died of pneumonia midway through filming an episode. The script was hastily rewritten - he was said to be in meetings with the chief constable.
Edinburgh Evening News: June 2008
PEOPLE Spinning out a new Skinner
AS a spin doctor for the Tories at the height of their Eighties reign, Quintin Jardine may have been forgiven for having told his fair share of tall tales.
It was the Poll Tax era, Scots were smarting over the dismantling of their coal industry and braced for the shutdown of British Steel at Ravenscraig, watching with bitterness as the Iron Lady's policies created a London Yuppie culture while unemployment and discontent north of the Border soared.
There's a wicked chuckle in Jardine's voice as the publicity man turned bestselling crime author reflects on a period most Scots might prefer to forget. "The Eighties were a great time," he grins broadly. "We had a war, we won the European Elections, we won general elections, we crushed Scargill. And we had a damn good laugh doing it."
Incongruous as that sounds coming from a son born within Labour's heartland - Jardine now lives in Gullane but he hails from Lanarkshire - he maintains supporting the Tories when everyone around him was hoisting the red flag was, for him anyway, the logical thing to do.
"British Steel was going down the tubes anyway," he shrugs. "That wasn't Thatcher's fault but she was blamed for it. Having experienced ten years of Tony Blair we now have something to measure Thatcher by," he concludes. "Talk about 'never mind the quality, feel the width!'"
Bucking the popular trend appears to have become Jardine's niche. His fictional cop Bob Skinner is no down-at-heel ordinary copper, he's a deputy chief constable with cases of middle-class skulduggery, fiddling businessmen and crooked lawyers to deal with.
Where other crime writers may prefer to pick over drug-fuelled crime on sink estates and bloody bust ups among gangland crime lords, Jardine's books have an upwardly mobile touch.
The clever formula has served him well. Father of two Jardine, 62, is now preparing for a busy UK tour publicising his 18th Skinner novel, Aftershock, due to hit the bookshelves on May 1.
It is, he explains, a natural follow-on from his 17th Skinner, Death's Door, spinning events from its pages into a new series of murders across the Lothians for his no-nonsense, straight-talking deputy chief constable to crack.
"Aftershock picks up from where Death's Door ended," he confirms. "At the end of Death's Door, the crimes appear to have been solved, but Aftershock picks up from that right at the start.
"There's a body found, the 'MO' is disturbingly similar to the way the victims in Death's Door were killed, and the police quickly realise they have seen this before. But is it a serial killer or is it a copycat?"
Of course, to find out you have to read the book. For there are no plans - right now, at least - to transport Skinner and his fictional Lothian and Borders coppers and criminals from the printed page to the small screen.
"There might be a move away from cop series on television at the moment," reflects Jardine, before hinting that he is preparing for at least one meeting with a television companies executives soon. "That said I'm not that bothered about TV. A couple of years back I had talks, I was sent a screenplay, I looked at it and thought it was awful.
"They'd got a highly rated screenwriter for it, yet I didn't recognise half of the characters. Somehow Skinner had acquired a brother-in-law who was a lawyer who I'd never heard of!
"There were secondary characters that I didn't have a clue about and the most damning of all was that there was hardly anything in the storyline that I actually recognised."
He laughs out loud, bemused and astonished at the notion that the characters and twisting plots he'd slaved over for so long could be so drastically reinvented.
"I know it's happened with other author's work - the Rebus series with Ken Stott wasn't half mutilated," he continues. "For a start, they made Rebus a Hibby! Ian Rankin's work is scrupulous in not adhering him to any football club."
Born the son of two teachers in Motherwell in June 1945, Jardine went on to Glasgow University to study law only to drop out in favour of a career in journalism working for a local paper. He moved to East Lothian in the early Seventies, switching jobs to become a government information officer and later political spin doctor for the Conservatives and later the SNP. Writing novels for a living didn't enter his head until his late first wife, Irene, responded to his declaration that he could have written a better book than the one he had just read, by suggesting that he should.
The result was his first stab at crime writing, Skinner's Rules, published in 1994. Three years later his wife lost a desperate fight against cancer: today a wedding ring dangles on a chain around his neck.
He remarried five years later, to Eileen, yet his late wife's impact on his life remains - the touching foreword on his last Skinner novel was in her memory: "Her special light wasn't extinguished. It will shine on until the last person who ever knew her is gone, and beyond, I hope, through these words, on whatever library shelves they may come eventually to gather dust."
For more information on Quintin Jardine's work to go www.quintinjardine.com
Edinburgh Evening News April 2008
It was the Poll Tax era, Scots were smarting over the dismantling of their coal industry and braced for the shutdown of British Steel at Ravenscraig, watching with bitterness as the Iron Lady's policies created a London Yuppie culture while unemployment and discontent north of the Border soared.
There's a wicked chuckle in Jardine's voice as the publicity man turned bestselling crime author reflects on a period most Scots might prefer to forget. "The Eighties were a great time," he grins broadly. "We had a war, we won the European Elections, we won general elections, we crushed Scargill. And we had a damn good laugh doing it."
Incongruous as that sounds coming from a son born within Labour's heartland - Jardine now lives in Gullane but he hails from Lanarkshire - he maintains supporting the Tories when everyone around him was hoisting the red flag was, for him anyway, the logical thing to do.
"British Steel was going down the tubes anyway," he shrugs. "That wasn't Thatcher's fault but she was blamed for it. Having experienced ten years of Tony Blair we now have something to measure Thatcher by," he concludes. "Talk about 'never mind the quality, feel the width!'"
Bucking the popular trend appears to have become Jardine's niche. His fictional cop Bob Skinner is no down-at-heel ordinary copper, he's a deputy chief constable with cases of middle-class skulduggery, fiddling businessmen and crooked lawyers to deal with.
Where other crime writers may prefer to pick over drug-fuelled crime on sink estates and bloody bust ups among gangland crime lords, Jardine's books have an upwardly mobile touch.
The clever formula has served him well. Father of two Jardine, 62, is now preparing for a busy UK tour publicising his 18th Skinner novel, Aftershock, due to hit the bookshelves on May 1.
It is, he explains, a natural follow-on from his 17th Skinner, Death's Door, spinning events from its pages into a new series of murders across the Lothians for his no-nonsense, straight-talking deputy chief constable to crack.
"Aftershock picks up from where Death's Door ended," he confirms. "At the end of Death's Door, the crimes appear to have been solved, but Aftershock picks up from that right at the start.
"There's a body found, the 'MO' is disturbingly similar to the way the victims in Death's Door were killed, and the police quickly realise they have seen this before. But is it a serial killer or is it a copycat?"
Of course, to find out you have to read the book. For there are no plans - right now, at least - to transport Skinner and his fictional Lothian and Borders coppers and criminals from the printed page to the small screen.
"There might be a move away from cop series on television at the moment," reflects Jardine, before hinting that he is preparing for at least one meeting with a television companies executives soon. "That said I'm not that bothered about TV. A couple of years back I had talks, I was sent a screenplay, I looked at it and thought it was awful.
"They'd got a highly rated screenwriter for it, yet I didn't recognise half of the characters. Somehow Skinner had acquired a brother-in-law who was a lawyer who I'd never heard of!
"There were secondary characters that I didn't have a clue about and the most damning of all was that there was hardly anything in the storyline that I actually recognised."
He laughs out loud, bemused and astonished at the notion that the characters and twisting plots he'd slaved over for so long could be so drastically reinvented.
"I know it's happened with other author's work - the Rebus series with Ken Stott wasn't half mutilated," he continues. "For a start, they made Rebus a Hibby! Ian Rankin's work is scrupulous in not adhering him to any football club."
Born the son of two teachers in Motherwell in June 1945, Jardine went on to Glasgow University to study law only to drop out in favour of a career in journalism working for a local paper. He moved to East Lothian in the early Seventies, switching jobs to become a government information officer and later political spin doctor for the Conservatives and later the SNP. Writing novels for a living didn't enter his head until his late first wife, Irene, responded to his declaration that he could have written a better book than the one he had just read, by suggesting that he should.
The result was his first stab at crime writing, Skinner's Rules, published in 1994. Three years later his wife lost a desperate fight against cancer: today a wedding ring dangles on a chain around his neck.
He remarried five years later, to Eileen, yet his late wife's impact on his life remains - the touching foreword on his last Skinner novel was in her memory: "Her special light wasn't extinguished. It will shine on until the last person who ever knew her is gone, and beyond, I hope, through these words, on whatever library shelves they may come eventually to gather dust."
For more information on Quintin Jardine's work to go www.quintinjardine.com
Edinburgh Evening News April 2008
PEOPLE: Confessions of a serial wordsmith
Next, he's not seen the finished film of his first and possibly most famous novel, destined for television screens in the next few weeks.
Finally, he's not even glimpsed the slightly cheeky tea commercial clearly inspired by his "traditionally built" heroine, the courteous, sensible and witty Mma Ramotswe - a character whose giant personality and slightly bumbling approach to solving crime has become one of the best-loved figures on the bookshop shelves.
As one of the most prolific writers around, who churns out beautifully crafted, often witty and absorbing chapters of two books at a time, he can be forgiven.
Still trying to balance his body clock after a trip to the other side of the world - he's not long back at his Merchiston villa after an event for writers in Florida and prior to that a literary festival in Sri Lanka - McCall Smith has rather given up on trying to keep track of anything other than what his writing duties are for the day and when he can head for his afternoon nap.
He is sitting at his busy writing desk in a cluttered study on the first floor of the home he shares with his wife, Bruntsfield GP, Elizabeth, co-founder of his other great interest, the Really Terrible Orchestra, in which he plays bassoon badly.
The writing room - walls lined with heaving bookcases - is bathed in gentle sunlight, his desk groans under the weight of African objet d'art, a strikingly modern Apple iMac dominates the vast worktop alongside a credit card-sized iPod and a note from his PA listing three key writing jobs that are, for the day at least, his priority.
He sips from a battered blue and white china mug, a v-shaped chunk is missing from the rim, yet the bestselling author who by now must have made a decent fortune from his 60 or so books and the sale of at least one set of film rights, clearly doesn't mind.
Instead he is dwelling on the transformation of his 1988 Botswana-based novel, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, from the printed page to the small screen courtesy of Oscar-winning English Patient director Anthony Minghella and leading lady, jazz songstress but movie novice, Jill Scott.
"I haven't seen the film," he concedes, "but the excerpts I have seen have been very powerful. The trailer is really lovely.
"I saw them filming in Botswana, I saw the set and met the actors."
It's been a tall order transposing a bestselling novel, remarkable for its fine morals and lack of blood and gore, to the screen. Indeed, original thoughts that it might be for cinema release were eventually replaced with a realisation that Mma Ramotswe's gentle pace and the relatively minor crimes she solves might not have cinema goers queuing around the block.
Nevertheless, McCall Smith does let slip that the first television screening of his books - thought to be scheduled for Easter - will be one of many.
"Anthony Minghella wants to make a series. So there will be a TV series which will have many films. But I'm really not to say anything," he chuckles, eyes sparkling.
"It seemed to take a long time from when I first sold the film rights, but I gather that is often the case," he explains. "Then Antony Minghella said he wanted to make the film - I very much admired the films of his that I had seen. But it's a very complicated business getting everything lined up. It involves such large logistics, it was complicated, but they did it."
His initial concerns that the book would be given glossy Hollywood treatment were unfounded. Instead, Minghella and his crew headed to Botswana - a country which had never before hosted a movie, but which greeted the opportunity with the same courtesy and enthusiasm you might expect Mma Ramotswe to welcome a troubled client with.
"I was pleased it was filmed in Botswana, I was keen that something that had such a strong association with that country should continue to be associated with it," he remarks.
"It's much cheaper to make things in a studio in Hollywood than to make them on location in Botswana, but I'm happy to say they did."
It's a major milestone in the softly-spoken, acutely intelligent author's career. Now retired as Professor of Medical Law at Edinburgh University, he first set about writing in 1980 when he cautiously entered a Chambers competition for new writers and found himself a winner in the children's book category.
It was 1988 before Mma Ramotswe made her first appearance. Today he is seamlessly working on two books from two other series, both at the same time.
"It's a pretty busy existence," he says, masterful in understatement. "I'm writing four books a year. Now I have two books on the go: volume five of Isabel Dalhousie and volume five of Scotland Street, which is in The Scotsman.
"I'm often up at 4am, I'll write for several hours before going back to bed briefly. So far today, I have written a chapter of Scotland Street and will write a chapter of Isabel Dalhousie later."
The results are a string of books which frequently top bestsellers lists. Not bad for an author who originally reckoned his style would be appreciated by only a niche audience of readers.
"I was reconciled to being a writer with a small readership," admits the 59-year-old father of two daughters, Lucy, 23, and Emily, 19. "At the stage my books were published everyone seemed to be more interested in rather grittier sorts of books."
Their popularity exploded thanks to the American market, where readers couldn't get enough of the simple, highly moral and respectful ways of the Botswana detective and her associates.
Indeed, it's a perfect antidote to a society which McCall Smith agrees has lost track of its own morals.
"We have always had social problems, we have to keep what we see today in perspective. In some respects, Scotland is a better place to live then it was some time ago.
"But the society we have created can have its negative side. Statistics about the unhappiness of children suffering are really rather bleak and there are fundamental questions we need to ask ourselves about what is going wrong," he declares.
"We need to recreate a civic society and part of that is having a sense of respect for one another. We are now creating a totally amoral generation where none of the basic building blocks of society have been instilled in people."
Perhaps a little dose of Mma Ramotswe, a journey to Botswana and an insight into its people's courteous ways, brought to us by Edinburgh's Alexander McCall Smith is exactly what we need.
OUT OF AFRICA
ALEXANDER McCall Smith was born to a Scottish father and Southern Rhodesian mother and was raised in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. He went to school in Bulawayo, near the border with Botswana.
He came to Scotland when he was 18 to pursue his academic career and has lived here ever since. His wife, Elizabeth is a GP in Bruntsfield and they have two teenage daughters.
The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency was the first in a string of Botswana-based novels featuring his best known character, Mma Ramotswe. It was later followed by a series of novellas featuring a fictional German professor, Dr Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld; the Isabel Dalhousie Sunday Philosphy Club series featuring a quaint 40-something Edinburgh detective; and his Scotland Street serial.
In addition he has published several books of short stories.
He lives in Merchiston in an area dubbed "Bestsellers' Corner" within walking distance of fellow authors Ian Rankin and JK Rowling.
Edinburgh Evening News, Feb 2008
PEOPLE: Preparing to close the book on Rebus
There hasn't been much time for tidying up, he explains. Not when you've just driven 1000 miles from Dordogne in France after an emotional weekend spent clearing out what was the family bolt-hole - and the place where he wrote many of the Rebus novels - to make way for its new owners, packing up favourite belongings and even making space in the car for a crate of windfall apples from the orchard that they couldn't bear to leave behind.
If breaking up the Rankin retreat was hard - "My wife was in floods of tears, pointing to things like the kitchen sink and saying: 'Remember we bathed the children there when they were babies'" - there hasn't been too much time to think about it. So far, his plan to take a year off and do as little as possible have been thwarted by simply having too much to do.
Before the manic 2000-mile round trip to France, there was a string of interviews to be done, more to be organised - including a bizarre bus trip in which Ian will accompany a group of German journalists on a tour of Rebus's Edinburgh haunts with the author chatting into a microphone and pointing out places of interest as they go. All that plus the small matter of attending GQ magazine's glittering awards ceremony, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Pierce Brosnan, Charlotte Church, Jamie and Louise Redknapp, the Little Britain stars and Robbie Williams.
"Actually I rubbed shoulders with Robbie Williams' bodyguards," he stresses with a laugh. "They kind of shoved me out of the way to let him past." At least he won the magazine's writer of the year award - beating the likes of Salman Rushdie, Tony Parsons and Ian McEwan in the process - and received a personal invitation from Gordon Ramsay to call his restaurant any time and he'd make sure he'd fit him in for a meal.
"Oh, and I got my award from Carol Vorderman," he says excitedly. "Now that was really quite good..."
In fact, life is pretty good for the man who has put Edinburgh's criminal underbelly on the modern literary map, whose Rebus novels have dominated international thriller bestseller lists for almost a decade and who appears to be doing as much for the city's tourism industry as anything VisitScotland has so far managed to come up with.
Fans from Australia, Canada and the United States make regular pilgrimages to Rebus's beat, desperate to see for themselves St Leonard's Police Station, the Oxford Bar and his fictional home in Arden Terrace. "They want to find out about the city they've been reading about for years," explains Ian. "So they come and walk into the bar where Rebus drinks and see the street where he lives.
"It's not like fiction, he becomes a real person. Sometimes they come into the Oxford Bar while I'm there but are sadly disappointed when they meet me. They want this complex, damaged alcoholic. They don't want the creator, they want the character."
Dressed in loose jeans and a faded black T-shirt, Ian sinks into a large comfortable settee in the sunny lounge of his Victorian mansion in one of the city's most affluent areas.
In a millionaires' row of homes - fellow authors Alexander McCall Smith and JK Rowling live nearby - this is every inch a lived-in, busy family home, with tomato vines growing in the conservatory and the cats' litter tray on the floor. And it's still a far cry from those humble beginnings as a shopkeeper's son in the small Fife mining community of Cardenden.
From what he calls a "slow burn" which almost led to him being dropped by his publishers, these days his books fly off the shelves selling at least 500,000 copies in the first three months of their publication. His novels are the most borrowed books in Scotland's libraries and one - Black and Blue - even features on the school curriculum. The Rebus industry is rumoured to earn the author a tidy GBP 500,000 a year.
Soon his audience will expand further when ITV viewers tune in to a new Rebus played by craggy Edinburgh-born Ken Stott - with Ian appearing for an instant in a Hitchcock-like cameo.
It's all been ticking along nicely... there's just one small blip on the horizon, a niggling issue that needs to be dealt with and one that Rebus fans the world over have been dreading. It's also partly the reason why he's opted to take a year off.
"I wanted to take stock. Rebus is 60, he's got to retire. There are two books to go. Does he retire and stay in Scotland? Does the smoking ban in public places force him to move to Marbella?"
Ian, who is 45, laughs. Marbella, he stresses, is a bit unlikely, but so far at least, even he doesn't know exactly how the final chapter in the last Rebus novel will pan out.
To help him along, he's spent the last few months re-reading his own work, retracing his leading character's steps, identifying gaps in his personality, hoping to tie up loose ends and surprising himself along the way.
"I'd never actually read my own books before," he explains. "I'd write one and then it would be straight on to the next story. But I'm enjoying reading them now - I've even found myself wondering what happens in the end. So it's been an interesting experience."
Revisiting his literary past has also provided the platform for his latest work, Rebus's Scotland, which intertwines his own journey from Fife to becoming a best-selling author, with a biography of his famous fictional detective - revealing striking similarities with the author.
Its publication coincides with another Ian Rankin trip back in time: his first novel, The Flood, which sold just a handful of copies back in 1986, has also been re-released. So with two books to publicise and an up-and-coming television drama in the pipeline, Ian's year off was never really going to be spent relaxing in the front room, stroking the cats. "I was a bit tired of it all," he admits. "The book tours, the interviews. It's not just the UK, there's Australia, Canada, America and the 27 other countries. I wanted time out to think about things about Rebus I've not said, things I wanted to say, tie things up."
So what can the Rebus fan expect from those two, final books? Perhaps reading the Evening News will help provide the clues, hints Ian.
"I get a lot of stuff from the Evening News," he admits. "I'll tear out a page and stick it in a folder. The paper is a great source for me."
"The final book will have to tie up a few loose ends including the relationship between Rebus and Cafferty, the main villain.
"But I've not really thought about the final scene," he admits.
All I know is that it will be weird to write that last chapter. The blokes at the Oxford Bar say I should just go and get a real job. I've been thinking a bit about radio plays and working more with actors.
"Then again, JK Rowling said when she finishes Harry Potter she might write a thriller. Maybe I'll do a swop with her and write a children's book... who knows?"
* Rebus's Scotland: A Personal Journey by Ian Rankin, price GBP 20. The Flood is GBP 14.99, both published by Orion Books
Edinburgh Evening News: September 2005
PEOPLE: Death is a way of life for Kathy
THE stained brown preserved skeleton of a young child dangles eerily from a hook and chain which has pierced its carefully dissected skull, causing it to sway gently to and fro.
Leathery skin and tangled knots of nerves cloak miniature bones, the mouth is pursed tightly, only slightly revealing a neat row of little teeth. The tiny plaque beneath its feet reads simply "skeleton".
Forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs peers through the glass cabinet to inspect the long-dead remains a little closer. Perhaps with time, a well-equipped laboratory and a microscope, she might be able to unravel the secrets of its short life and its untimely demise.
For death - even that of a 19th-century Edinburgh child - is just the beginning of the story for one of the few women in the world who can make bones talk.
The skeleton continues its incessant sway backwards and forwards as Kathy, a petite, no-nonsense blonde in a pink shirt and neat denims, casts her experienced eye around the bottles of human specimens, gnarled sections of bones and slivers of body parts that once formed the living and whose role in death has been to educate and inform the doctors of the future at the Royal College of Surgeons in Nicolson Street.
She's curious about the child but she's not here for the day job. She's come to Edinburgh in her other role, that of international best-selling author whose forensic thrillers combining murder, mystery and medical science have snared a legion of devoted fans who can't get enough of the blood and gore of the autopsy table. The latest offering - her seventh - sees her transport her central character Temperance Brennan, a straight-talking forensic anthropologist not unlike herself, to Israel to unearth biblical mysteries surrounding ancient bones.
But could her next novel take the fictional forensic anthropologist to a city which can claim a major role in laying down the foundations for modern forensic science, right here in Edinburgh? "My next book will be along the lines of Burke and Hare", Kathy reveals in her soft American drawl. "Not so much robbing graves, it will be about people stealing bodies to sell the organs. But Burke and Hare will feature in it and it will have a Scottish theme."
That novel is still a work in progress - Kathy's hectic schedule as forensic anthropologist working for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina, and the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale in Quebec, is juggled alongside international book appearances and work on an eagerly awaited TV series, Bones. It means opportunities to write fiction are crunched down to the "spare moment" category.
"I'm still in the middle of researching and it hasn't yet got a title, but I think it will have by next week," she reveals, casting her experienced eye around the exhibits contained in the Surgeons' Hall Museum. "So while I'm here I'd like to buy a book about Burke and Hare."
Perhaps the Alexander McCall Smith Edinburgh-based novel 44 Scotland Street, which is peeking out of her pink leather handbag, is helping with her research, along with her good friend, Rebus author Ian Rankin - the pair have both spoken admiringly of each other's work.
Back at Surgeons' Hall she pauses in front of an exhibit of Professor Robert Knox, the Edinburgh anatomist who gratefully accepted Burke and Hare's newly dispatched cadavers in exchange for a princely GBP 7.10/. Skeletons are positioned on either side of the disgraced doctor's desk, grisly human specimens in glass jars are arranged on the floor yet they hardly receive a second glance from Kathy.
After all, her entire career has revolved around the deceased; her sharp powers of observation - she once identified the bones of a seamstress nun from the grooves years of pulling thread had made in her teeth - have helped to lay to rest dozens of tortured souls.
Away from the book tours, she may be found up to her elbows in putrefying remains, trudging through mass graves of murdered women and their young children slaughtered by death squads in Guatemala, unearthing Second World War victims or sifting through the rubble of Ground Zero, separating animal bones from human remains. The dead are never far away.
SHE has become internationally recognised for her ability to decipher skeletons' secrets, usually employing simply her powers of observation - she is no fan of modern scientific gizmos and technology. It is a skill that has taken her from examining remains from the US Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to Rwanda, to testify in the UN genocide tribunal.
She has examined ancient Egyptian mummies and held in her hands the Child of Taung, the fossilised infant skull found near Taung in South Africa and dated at about 2.5 million years old.
That experience was closest to her roots. Originally trained as an archaeologist, Kathy almost fell into her forensic anthropologist's role when murder investigators in North Carolina sought her help analysing the skeleton of a five-year-old girl. "I had been dealing with ancient bones and then suddenly the police started to bring me bones to look at. As I started working with the coroner, I saw it was work that impacted on someone's life, giving answers to their questions and helping put some of these violent offenders away."
By its very nature, it's work - whether on her hands and knees scraping mud off bones in a filthy pit or battering away on her PC for the next blockbusting novel or television drama - that is often grim, grisly and sometimes grotesque. Why on earth would anyone choose to spend their days surrounded by rotting flesh, squirming maggots and the putrid aroma of death?
"I have to detach myself from it," she explains simply. "You can't go about with it on your mind. It would send you mad. The hardest cases are the ones involving battered children in any circumstances but especially those that are victims of violence from abusive parents. The difficult cases are ones where the victims are totally innocent, battered women, battered children. Innocent, helpless victims."
"I have some cases that are not solved, they are still in my warehouse," she continues.
"I go through them periodically, looking at them. There's a young woman who looks like she was beheaded with cut marks on the back of her neck and skull.
"I've had her since 1996. I've got some kids that I have had for a while but never identified.
"Once the bones are completely dried and there is no soft tissue, then it's very hard to pinpoint much about them."
There are some cases that can't fail to strike an emotional chord despite Kathy's archaeological and forensic background. After all, she's a mother of three herself.
"I've got one little skeleton. This child has had fillings in their teeth. So there must have been a parent that cared enough about this child to take them to the dentist to have their teeth fixed, yet we haven't been able to identify them. That is very hard."
Man's inhumanity to his fellow man, woman and child no longer surprises her. Death in its many forms has become a way of life: she even admits to tuning into some of the multitude of television dramas hooking into the fascination with forensics.
"Honestly, they aren't my preferred choice, I'd rather be reading a book," she admits. "And quite often I find them very unrealistic. Take CSI. In reality, scene-of-crime officers don't run around investigating crimes the way those ones do. However I watch them because I feel I should keep a pulse on them even though most are not quite true to life."
She's quick to add that Bones is. Her own TV drama, already snapped up by Sky One, it is due to be screened next spring.
"Bones will strive for a level of realism other series can only hope to imitate," say series producers Fox Television.
It's real-life death, stories often gleaned from her own very real caseload. Kathy knows only too well that sometimes fact is far better than fiction.
"Now," she says, turnin
g to leave behind the swaying child's skeleton in its final resting place of Surgeons' Hall Museum. "Where can I buy a book about Burke and Hare?"
Cross Bones by Kathy Reichs is published by William Heinemann, hardback price £17.99
Leathery skin and tangled knots of nerves cloak miniature bones, the mouth is pursed tightly, only slightly revealing a neat row of little teeth. The tiny plaque beneath its feet reads simply "skeleton".
Forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs peers through the glass cabinet to inspect the long-dead remains a little closer. Perhaps with time, a well-equipped laboratory and a microscope, she might be able to unravel the secrets of its short life and its untimely demise.
For death - even that of a 19th-century Edinburgh child - is just the beginning of the story for one of the few women in the world who can make bones talk.
The skeleton continues its incessant sway backwards and forwards as Kathy, a petite, no-nonsense blonde in a pink shirt and neat denims, casts her experienced eye around the bottles of human specimens, gnarled sections of bones and slivers of body parts that once formed the living and whose role in death has been to educate and inform the doctors of the future at the Royal College of Surgeons in Nicolson Street.
She's curious about the child but she's not here for the day job. She's come to Edinburgh in her other role, that of international best-selling author whose forensic thrillers combining murder, mystery and medical science have snared a legion of devoted fans who can't get enough of the blood and gore of the autopsy table. The latest offering - her seventh - sees her transport her central character Temperance Brennan, a straight-talking forensic anthropologist not unlike herself, to Israel to unearth biblical mysteries surrounding ancient bones.
But could her next novel take the fictional forensic anthropologist to a city which can claim a major role in laying down the foundations for modern forensic science, right here in Edinburgh? "My next book will be along the lines of Burke and Hare", Kathy reveals in her soft American drawl. "Not so much robbing graves, it will be about people stealing bodies to sell the organs. But Burke and Hare will feature in it and it will have a Scottish theme."
That novel is still a work in progress - Kathy's hectic schedule as forensic anthropologist working for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina, and the Laboratoire des Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale in Quebec, is juggled alongside international book appearances and work on an eagerly awaited TV series, Bones. It means opportunities to write fiction are crunched down to the "spare moment" category.
"I'm still in the middle of researching and it hasn't yet got a title, but I think it will have by next week," she reveals, casting her experienced eye around the exhibits contained in the Surgeons' Hall Museum. "So while I'm here I'd like to buy a book about Burke and Hare."
Perhaps the Alexander McCall Smith Edinburgh-based novel 44 Scotland Street, which is peeking out of her pink leather handbag, is helping with her research, along with her good friend, Rebus author Ian Rankin - the pair have both spoken admiringly of each other's work.
Back at Surgeons' Hall she pauses in front of an exhibit of Professor Robert Knox, the Edinburgh anatomist who gratefully accepted Burke and Hare's newly dispatched cadavers in exchange for a princely GBP 7.10/. Skeletons are positioned on either side of the disgraced doctor's desk, grisly human specimens in glass jars are arranged on the floor yet they hardly receive a second glance from Kathy.
After all, her entire career has revolved around the deceased; her sharp powers of observation - she once identified the bones of a seamstress nun from the grooves years of pulling thread had made in her teeth - have helped to lay to rest dozens of tortured souls.
Away from the book tours, she may be found up to her elbows in putrefying remains, trudging through mass graves of murdered women and their young children slaughtered by death squads in Guatemala, unearthing Second World War victims or sifting through the rubble of Ground Zero, separating animal bones from human remains. The dead are never far away.
SHE has become internationally recognised for her ability to decipher skeletons' secrets, usually employing simply her powers of observation - she is no fan of modern scientific gizmos and technology. It is a skill that has taken her from examining remains from the US Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to Rwanda, to testify in the UN genocide tribunal.
She has examined ancient Egyptian mummies and held in her hands the Child of Taung, the fossilised infant skull found near Taung in South Africa and dated at about 2.5 million years old.
That experience was closest to her roots. Originally trained as an archaeologist, Kathy almost fell into her forensic anthropologist's role when murder investigators in North Carolina sought her help analysing the skeleton of a five-year-old girl. "I had been dealing with ancient bones and then suddenly the police started to bring me bones to look at. As I started working with the coroner, I saw it was work that impacted on someone's life, giving answers to their questions and helping put some of these violent offenders away."
By its very nature, it's work - whether on her hands and knees scraping mud off bones in a filthy pit or battering away on her PC for the next blockbusting novel or television drama - that is often grim, grisly and sometimes grotesque. Why on earth would anyone choose to spend their days surrounded by rotting flesh, squirming maggots and the putrid aroma of death?
"I have to detach myself from it," she explains simply. "You can't go about with it on your mind. It would send you mad. The hardest cases are the ones involving battered children in any circumstances but especially those that are victims of violence from abusive parents. The difficult cases are ones where the victims are totally innocent, battered women, battered children. Innocent, helpless victims."
"I have some cases that are not solved, they are still in my warehouse," she continues.
"I go through them periodically, looking at them. There's a young woman who looks like she was beheaded with cut marks on the back of her neck and skull.
"I've had her since 1996. I've got some kids that I have had for a while but never identified.
"Once the bones are completely dried and there is no soft tissue, then it's very hard to pinpoint much about them."
There are some cases that can't fail to strike an emotional chord despite Kathy's archaeological and forensic background. After all, she's a mother of three herself.
"I've got one little skeleton. This child has had fillings in their teeth. So there must have been a parent that cared enough about this child to take them to the dentist to have their teeth fixed, yet we haven't been able to identify them. That is very hard."
Man's inhumanity to his fellow man, woman and child no longer surprises her. Death in its many forms has become a way of life: she even admits to tuning into some of the multitude of television dramas hooking into the fascination with forensics.
"Honestly, they aren't my preferred choice, I'd rather be reading a book," she admits. "And quite often I find them very unrealistic. Take CSI. In reality, scene-of-crime officers don't run around investigating crimes the way those ones do. However I watch them because I feel I should keep a pulse on them even though most are not quite true to life."
She's quick to add that Bones is. Her own TV drama, already snapped up by Sky One, it is due to be screened next spring.
"Bones will strive for a level of realism other series can only hope to imitate," say series producers Fox Television.
It's real-life death, stories often gleaned from her own very real caseload. Kathy knows only too well that sometimes fact is far better than fiction.
"Now," she says, turnin
g to leave behind the swaying child's skeleton in its final resting place of Surgeons' Hall Museum. "Where can I buy a book about Burke and Hare?"
Cross Bones by Kathy Reichs is published by William Heinemann, hardback price £17.99
PEOPLE: Iain Banks on why his views 'Matter'.
THERE really never was any question over what the young Iain Banks would do when he grew up.
He was around 11 years old, his teacher had asked the class to draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they were older. The image he drew might not have been picture perfect, but it gained top marks for accuracy.
"My pals were drawing astronauts and firemen and train drivers and I didn't know how to draw a writer so I drew an actor with purple and orange hair looking like he was telling a story," he remembers with a grin.
"In the top left hand corner there was a bit of brown paper and I wrote on it in white crayon, 'writer'. So I rather nailed my colours to the mast at a fairly early age."
He laughs as he remembers the episode with total recall - handy for a writer - every detail from the texture of paper to the colours of the crayons described with crystal clarity in the kind of intricate detail typically found within the pages of his 25 or so novels. Yet when he drew that picture almost four decades ago, he might well have included the words "anti-war campaigner", "dedicated environmentalist" and "sworn enemy of Tony Blair".
For a man who not so long ago ripped up his passport in an act of fury over the Iraq war, grabbed headlines when he publicly declared his backing for Scottish independence and renounced his "petrol head" status when he sold his beloved collection of sporty souped-up cars - bizarrely, he now drives a Toyota Yaris - Banks has earned an admirable track record for being outspoken, passionate and principled.
Yet it's as one of Scotland's leading authors that he is best known. His first novel, The Wasp Factory, hit the bookshelves to massive critical acclaim in 1984, his profile soared higher in the mid-Nineties when The Crow Road transferred to the small screen, followed by the albeit less successful adaptation of Complicity.
Among it all have been a string of other mainstream novels - his last, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, has received high praise as one of his best. For a more niche audience, the latest giant instalment of the sci-fi "Culture" utopia created under his alter ego, Iain M Banks - Matter, his new book, is a massive 250,000 words long - has most recently kept him busy.
Although "busy" in most people's understanding of the word doesn't fully apply to the North Queensferry-based author.
"Writing takes me about three months of keyboard clattering. Although I insist I'm working most of the year, to the uneducated it does rather look like I'm just loafing around. I'm actually working
hard, going for a beer, having a curry, going for a walk," he laughs, "that's thinking time.
"Right now I'm in an important stage, thinking about thinking about the next book," grin broadening. "I'm due to start work on Monday, October 17, and I'll be finished just in time for Christmas."
It's a work pattern the Dunfermline-born author follows year on year which has succeeded in keeping his popularity high - he was recently voted the fifth- greatest British writer of all time in an internet poll.
And keeping a large chunk of the year free to "think" also gives him time to thrash out opinions on the key issues that trouble him - and clearly, there's a few.
He's recently just been reacquainted with his passport, the last one he ceremoniously chopped up and posted to 10 Downing Street, addressed to Mr T Blair in protest over what Banks passionately believes is an illegal war.
It was either that, or drive his beloved Land Rover through the gates of Rosyth Dockyard - luckily for British literature and the car, the passport got it.
"I felt ashamed to be British, my passport was a symbol of Britishness and I didn't want to be an ambassador for Britain," he declares. "I got it back last summer when Gordon replaced Mr Blair."
Reapplying for his passport was almost as surreal as popping his last one, in pieces, in the post.
"When you apply to get a new passport you have all these questions to answer such as if your passport is missing, when did you last see it? And I had to say, well it was somewhere between the post box in North Queensferry and No 10 Downing Street.
"I managed to squeeze a little explanation in this tiny box after the question that asked what had happened to it. I wrote that I had sent it to the Prime Minister in protest at the Iraq War," the grin reappears beneath the salt and pepper stubble beard. "I was expecting there to be a bit of rammy about it but in fact it came through very efficiently."
He nods in agreement that it might well have come back via M15, but he doesn't care. "Iraq is just criminal," he continues, anger rising. "Tony Blair should be in the International Court of Justice in the Hague. It is bad enough the man is a liar, but to be a warmonger is even worse."
He is less harsh on his North Queensferry neighbour who just happens to be Blair's replacement, Gordon Brown. Although he does gleefully point out that the two live within "mortar lobbing" distance of each other, their paths seldom cross.
Banks again nailed his colours to the mast when he became a signatory to the Declaration of Calton Hill which calls for independence.
"I voted for the SNP in the past because they were slightly more left-wing than Labour, but then Ted Heath had more left-wing policies than New Labour," he explains. "I have been pleasantly surprised at how well they have done. If that leads to Scotland being more progressive, that's a good thing as well."
In his youth he considered himself British - now, having witnessed the progressive destruction of nationalised industries and Thatcherism, he's less red, white and blue. The Prime Minister next door might want a British pledge but Banks dismisses the notion as "cretinous" and "bananas".
"I'm at a stage of thinking we have to leave England to its fate," he adds. "If it wants to leave the EU, then let it stew in its own past imperial dreamland. Scotland can be a great small country in Europe. We can make a success of it and be a more humane society than this privatised and selfishness orientated country."
He's not one for half measures - in opinions or his much-loved whisky glass - but it all comes at a price. There's a wistful look as he recalls the thrusting engine of his now departed Porsche 911 Turbo, the sleekness of his Porsche Boxster S, the comfort of his BMW M5 and the workhorse Land Rover Discovery - GBP 100,000 worth of wheels given up in favour of a Toyota Yaris.
"I'm still a petrol head," he insists, "but after 30 years of reading the New Scientist, I thought it was time to make a decision. I don't fly either unless I really have to."
So he now dodges around in his little Yaris, thinking of his next mainstream novel, meeting sci-fi fans eager to snap up his latest Iain M Banks work, and dreaming of the day when he can get his hands on the latest environmentally friendly sports car, a Tesla Roadster. He may be embracing a new mode of environmentally conscientious living, but old habits clearly die hard.
"It's a battery-powered sports car made in Britain mostly for the Californian market but it's great, I've got to have one!
"Look, I reserve my right to have a sports car," he insists with a smile, "even if it will need to have a very long flex to get me from North Queensferry to London."
Edinburgh Evening News 15 March, 2008
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