I'm really quite normal. My imagination has some serious kinks in it, that's all.
Allan Guthrie
I'm teetotal and a vegetarian, which is sometimes a surprise to people who meet me expecting me to resemble one of the characters in my books.
Noir focuses on the criminal mind, not a whodunit: more why they did it and will they get away with it. The abnormal psychology is what fascinates me rather than the puzzle-solving aspect.
I took an MA course in creative writing a couple of years back, and I was definitely in the bottom of the class.
Some authors are quite happy - and have the time - to do it all themselves, which is great.
I try not to think about writers who came before me when I'm writing myself. If I did, given the abundance of literary talent Scotland - and Edinburgh in particular - has bestowed upon the world, I wouldn't be able to get as much as a sentence written.
I like to walk when I can. Otherwise, it's the bus - while we still have them.
Music was something I was encouraged to do, which I appeared to be quite good at, but it was never a passion. Writing was always my first love.
There is a dark side to Allan Guthrie, but only at the weekends.
Maybe it's the buildings, maybe it's the weather, but you can see it affects us - that Scottish gallows humour; our tendency towards bleakness, to look at things in a negative way. Those definitely come out in my writing.
Writing books that people want to read is helpful - my most successful book is my only police procedural, a very popular subgenre of the very popular crime fiction genre.
A number of people have read 'Two-Way Split' and made certain assumptions about what the author's like, and I'm highly disappointing to them. I don't drink, I don't eat meat; that's very disappointing for a hard-boiled writer.
It's possible to be hard-boiled and not noir, just as it's possible to be noir and not hard-boiled. And it is possible to be both. People debate endlessly what is hard-boiled and what is noir.
I managed to fit most of the writing to evenings and weekends, and my wife has been very supportive.
