DUBBED the queen of psychological thrillers, Val McDermid may have spent years making the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, yet she insists that she and her crime writer pals are actually quite a jovial lot.
She catches up with fellow novelists including her Edinburgh neighbour Ian Rankin at crime festivals.
"Crime writing's a very friendly, sociable world. We have festivals dedicated to crime writing. We all get together and it's very convivial."
Her 30th novel, Out Of Bounds, celebrates a career which has spanned more than 30 years, selling more than 11 million books, translated into 30 languages. The forthright feminist and lifelong Raith Rovers fan can't quite get her head around her career's longevity.
"When I started out, I thought I had five or six books in me. I didn't look far enough ahead. I find it quite hard to believe."
Her ambition and drive pushes her to new goals with each book.
"If you want each book to be better than the one before, you are raising the bar constantly," she says. "I want to be the best writer I can be, which means pushing myself harder with every book."
In her latest story, a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car and ends up in a coma, while a routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from 22 years before. But finding the answer to the cold case is not straightforward.
Meanwhile, DCI Karen Pirie finds herself drawn to another mystery which has its roots in a terrorist bombing two decades ago, and again, finds nothing is as it seems.
McDermid says cold-case investigation has allowed her more freedom as a writer.
"As Karen investigates historic cases, I can go anywhere with her. I can look at stories through a different end of the telescope and twist the kaleidoscope so you see things differently. I live in the here and now. I take an interest in politics, I take an interest in the world around me and those interests inevitably seep into the work. The issues that drive me find their way into the books."
McDermid was pleased with the television series Wire In The Blood, adapted from her books, starring Robson Green and Hermione Norris. But she's not bothered about TV.
"For me, the only purpose of adaptation is to draw people to the books. I'm a writer. So I would have to be confident that any adaptation was going to be well done and well made. To climb into bed with anyone who wanders along and offers me money to adapt one of my books holds no interest for me whatsoever."
McDermid returned to Edinburgh several years ago, after a "life change".
"It was time. My life had changed in some respects and made it possible to come home. I had got divorced."
She'd previously lived in England with her then civil partner Kelly Smith. They share custody of their son, now 15.
"In term time, I spend half the week in Manchester, because that's where my son is. I've been doing this for a long time now. We are all relaxed with the lives we have to lead.
"Of course," she adds, "I worry about my son's future given the current state of the economy, the prospects of Brexit, the global situation..."
McDermid (61) comes from a working class background in Fife – her father was a shipyard worker – and she was the first person from a state school in Scotland to attend St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she studied English.
"It was a culture shock and lots of things were different. For a start, I had to learn to speak English. I had a broad Fife accent and a lot of dialect. I had difficulties being understood.
"But I was lucky in that the college I went to, St Hilda's, had a very egalitarian feel to it and it wasn't a place where there were cliques of rich girls. You were judged on the quality of your mind, and people didn't care if your father was a dustman or a duke. That was very exciting and opened up a lot of doors for me that would otherwise never have been opened."
After university, she became a journalist – but only to pay the bills to support herself writing fiction.
Her first novel [Report For Murder] was published "to a resounding silence" in 1987. Her fourth – the first to feature private eye Kate Brannigan – clinched her a two-book deal, and her career started to take off.
It's harder to make it as a novelist now, she reflects, partly because of the hype which often pushes debut novelists to great heights before they've really started.
"It puts a huge amount of pressure on writers at the start of their career if they get the huge advance and the big fanfare of trumpets and the posters at the railway stations. If the second book isn't as good – and they often aren't – you can destroy a career before it's got off the ground.
"Ian Rankin and I always joke about how it took us 10 years to become an overnight sensation. That's a healthier thing for a writer. You need to understand there are things you have to learn, and it's hard to do that under the glare of the spotlight."
:: Out Of Bounds by Val McDermid is published by Little Brown.
