Author Biography

First thing I remember is zooming round our concrete back yard on my plastic trike then a bluebottle landed on my arm. Cue hysteria. Things continued much in this vein for a good few years.

I went to The University of Glasgow and studied Moral Philosophy. Unsurprisingly I remember very little of it. After that I was unemployed for a year or so and watched the entire contents of our local video shop. Two films a day for two pounds.

Then I started working in a music management company for a while.I wasn’t very good at it. Then I was asked to go and work at London Records which I did. There I commissioned music videos and artwork and photography. Then London sort of became Warners and I did the same thing there. I worked with some very good artists. New Order. The Streets. All Saints. Enya.

I started writing a book about social housing in post-war Glasgow which somehow became a crime novel set in 1973. That was Bloody January. I put it in a drawer for a while and went off to shoot cast interviews and b-roll on a film called Che directed by Steven Soderberg. I wasn’t very good at that either but it meant I went to Mexico and Spain and Cuba.

When I came back my friend John Niven, now a successful novelist and no longer a partner in crime at London Records, suggested I wrote a novel. I told him I had and I gave him Bloody January. He gave it to his agent who didn’t like it. That was the end of that I thought but he gave it to his friend Sarah Pinborough who liked it and gave it to another agent who also liked it. They suggested I go and see Canongate. I liked them and they liked me so I signed a deal.

Bloody January got published and did quite well so I wrote February’s Son and then Bobby March Will Live Forever. They also got published in various other countries translated into things like Blutiger Januar and Il Figlio Di Febbraio.

I also write things for TV and film, none of which ever seem to get made. So I now spend most of my time thinking up various horrible scenarios in the early seventies. I also walk a lot. That is the story of my life.