JOURNALIST-turned novelist Anna Smith once had a panic button installed in her home after a Glasgow hoodlum took out a contract on her life.

"After one gangster was murdered I wrote a scathing colour piece at the funeral, basically saying while all the limos etc and trappings were there for him, in the same cemetery lay the young kids who had died from the heroin he was pushing."

She adds, with a wry smile. "It didn't go down well."

Anna, an award-winning crime reporter, was once held hostage in a flat by a deviant, crazed armed robber, who owned an even more crazed Alsatian.

She travelled to Belfast on UFF stories, she faced terror in Kosovo, Rwanda and Romania and was once ambushed in Somalia.

Now, she's a best-selling crime writer who has come up with five novels featuring intrepid crime reporter, Rosie Gilmour, a lady who runs on adrenalin and vodka. And in her personal life she hits and runs.

But what's eminently clear is that Anna isn't one of the many cosy crime writers whose only connection to closest to the world of criminality is attending Neighbourhood Watch coffee mornings or watching reruns of Murder, She Wrote on Dave.

She grew up a burn-swimming, tree-climbing, football-playing tomboy, who decided she wanted to be a girl - and a journalist - round about the age of 14 (She studied shorthand at night school).

But Anna was also sensitive, always absorbing the world around her. And with a great imagination; she had to discover life outside Lanarkshire.

Aged 18, the teenager set off to travel the world for a year or so ("To live the hippy life in Morocco or wherever") but fate kicked in when she visited a relative in the sleepy, middle class East Sussex town of Eastbourne.

Anna spotted an ad for a junior reporter in the local paper, applied, and the editor took the chance on this 18-year-old Boadicea with an Airdrie accent.

But her sacking six months down the line reveals a great deal about another side of her character.

"I was doing well as a promising, tough, reporter," she recalls.

"But one of the main stories of the time was of the local Tory councillors trying to rid the beach of half a dozen vagrants.

"I thought this ridiculous, and so wrote a letter to my own paper under the name Hazel Cluster, defending the vagrants right to live a life."

No one at the paper realised the name was a chocolate in the Black Magic box and it ran as the Star Letter. Indeed, the editor was so impressed by the clever argument of the correspondence he sent a reporter out to interview the strident Hazel Cluster.

"They couldn't find her. But I couldn't resist telling some colleagues I had written it and somebody shopped me. And I was let go. Sacked. And my life fell apart because I'd felt the next move was Fleet Street."

Anna had loved her introductory ride on the roller coaster of reporting and wanted to get back on, fast. She returned to Scotland and raced through the local papers to a national tabloid.

However, it was too much too soon.

"I didn't even know what a tenement close was. I was twenty two and way too young to enter the bear pit, with journalists at that time swinging from chandeliers.

"But I learned to drink with reporters at half eight in the morning. I learned how to make great contacts - the police, lawyers. I watched reporters get their faces punched and I learned how to get into homes to get interviews. And I loved the world."

However, But as the years crept up on the journalist, the sense of invulnerability dissolved.

And when she began to write, award-winning, colour pieces on the likes of the Ravenscraig closure Anna realised she was more wrapped up in the human consequences of a story than the story of the drug dealer going to jail.

In 2003 she took redundancy and decided to become a novelist, recreating crime drama from some of her own experiences, and from the imagination which feeds off observation.

The idea for her new novel A Cold Killing, which begins in a London café with a bullet to the back of a Scots academic's skull, came about while sitting in a cafe in King's Cross.

Do the Rosie Gilmour novels offer the excitement she once had in her career? "Yes," she says, laughing.

"I live in a world where people don't exist except in my own mind. It's a mental illness. But I'd add my family - and the bills coming in - help keep me in the real world."

Anna, who now lives in Southern Ireland and in the south of Spain ("during the cold months") is now on a demanding, ("but fantastic") two-a-year book deal, with a remit to illuminate even more readers' ordinary lives, with deliciously dark tales of human misery, murder and mayhem.

But is she to Rosie Gilmour? She smiles and pauses for a moment before answering. "Yes," she says. "I guess I am. Rosie will take more chances than I have, but yes, I'll put my hand up and admit it. She's me."

A Cold Killing, by Anna Smith, Quercus Books, £7.99.