I'm not qualified for anything. I've had lots of little jobs, like picking grapes and being a tax man. I can't imagine not writing, because I've done it since I was five or six. Maybe I'd work in academia. That's always what the plan was.
My mother worked in a school canteen - then worked in the canteen of a chicken factory. Every Friday, the pay packet money would be allocated to cover bills.
My parents were working class and didn't have much money, so holidays tended to be two weeks in a caravan at St. Andrews or a B&B in Blackpool.
I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. If I walked into a creative writing class, all I could say to them was 'I tend to make it up as I go along.' I'm not sure that's brilliant advice.
I wrote 'Knots and Crosses,' the first of the Rebus books, not even realising that I was writing crime fiction.
The great thing about America is I always come back with more books and more tip-offs of who to read. It's a country in love with crime fiction.
Being working class, my parents thought, 'Ian's going to uni, the first in the family,' and I'd do dentistry or accountancy. I was going to do accountancy; then I got a C in Economics and thought, 'Why am I doing this?' The only thing I was interested in was books and literature.
'Jekyll and Hyde' I read in high school. I was expecting a Hollywood-type horror story and couldn't believe it when I got this very complex narrative from all these different points of view.
I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.
My father worked in a grocery store. When the grocery chain went into administration, he eventually got a job in the naval dockyard in an office preparing the charts for the boats and the submarines before they headed out.
I'm interested in Scotland now and then, how it's changed. I want to get the reader to think about that by thinking about something from the past. How has society changed, how has policing changed, have we changed philosophically, psychologically, culturally, spiritually?
The most difficult part of any crime novel is the plotting. It all begins simply enough, but soon you're dealing with a multitude of linked characters, strands, themes and red herrings - and you need to try to control these unruly elements and weave them into a pattern.
People aren't coming to me looking for political essays or polemic - they're looking for a rattling good story.
I don't have many friends. It's not because I'm a misanthrope. It's because I'm reserved. I'm self-contained. I get all my adventures in my head when I'm writing my books.
I dunno whether it was to do with my parents - we were working-class - but it was important to me to be self-sufficient.
I've always written. At the age of six or seven, I would get sheets of A4 paper and fold them in half, cut the edges to make a little eight-page booklet, break it up into squares and put in little stick men with little speech bubbles, and I'd have a spy story, a space story and a football story.
At all times, think like a writer, and keep those antennae twitching - that way, you pick up new ideas.
When I'm writing, I won't know whodunnit until maybe two thirds of the way through. Until then, I know as little as my detective. I just make it up as I go along. It's nerve-wracking, actually. You'll be half through and not know your conclusion. You worry one of these days the ending won't come. I'll be left with only two-thirds of a novel.
