Quintin Jardine is the author of two much-acclaimed and best-selling series of detective novels, as Eddie Bell and Pat Lomax, his agents, can be heard proclaiming to anyone who is listening, at book festivals around the world.

QJ is a crusty but urbane Scot, in his prime, and done with disclosing his age. (What’s that got to do with it anyway?) He was born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, and educated there and in Glasgow, where he studied snooker and, in his leisure moments, law, at what was then the city’s only University. After deciding that he would never reach professional status in either discipline, he looked towards a broader horizon. He enjoyed, most of the time, a wholly unplanned, but eventful career as a journalist, government information officer, political spin-doctor and media relations consultant, before deciding to find a job that was more in touch with reality. Thus he took to the creation of crime fiction like a Trident-loaded nuclear submarine to water.

He began work on an escape tunnel out of Motherwell in 1968; he surfaced briefly in Hamilton, but, realising very quickly that he had been heading in the wrong direction, resumed digging and three years later arrived in Gullane, East Lothian, where he has lived ever since. In recent years he has put down a second set of roots … a physically nonsensical metaphor, but you know what he means … in L’Escala, the only north-facing town on the Catalan Costa Brava, which is famed for its main products, anchovies and more Catalans, and notorious for a north wind, the Tramuntana, which can drive its men mad, but more usually, to drink. (Its women, ever practical, simply shrug and hang out the washing.)

He is married, to his second wife, Eileen, a beautiful Geordie, who tolerates, with a wistful smile, most of his eccentricities, including insatiable appetites for televised sport and for playing music very loud. His first wife, the glorious Irene, with whom he shared over 30 years,