WHAT does a woman with murder in mind look like? Myra Hindley? Rosemary West? Certainly not like this pleasant-featured former teacher, who frequently dissolves into laughter.
WHAT does a woman with murder in mind look like? Myra Hindley? Rosemary West? Certainly not like this pleasant-featured former teacher, who frequently dissolves into laughter.
Still, you would not want to poke around inside best-selling crime writer Lin Anderson's head.
"One of my publishers showed the first in the series to his mum and she said I loved that book, but is she a nice lady?'" Anderson says delightedly.
With a chuckle, she adds: "Crime writers are known for being nice people. That's not just me saying that. They've got that reputation. They must get it all out in the books.
"Denise Mina is so nice and she writes some scary books. Romantic novelists, now "
Anderson was inspired by her dad, Detective Inspector Bill Mitchell, of Greenock CID. Sadly, both parents died before her first book, Driftnet, was published, but she dedicates her novels to him and explains: "If you are a policeman, you need to go home to someone who keeps your feet on the ground. My dad never spoke to us about his work, but I do think my mother was his rock.
"The character of Detective Inspector Bill Wilson is loosely modelled on my dad because he has a family he worries about all the time.
"You realise when you get to my age how worrying it must have been to be a policeman in Greenock with three daughters and know what is going on.
"Of course when he used to try to warn us about things, we always thought he was just making a fuss."
Easy Kill, her fifth thriller featuring forensic scientist Dr Rhona MacLeod, had kept me reading into the small hours.
"Did I give you nightmares?" she asks hopefully.
Glasgow's Necropolis, the city of the dead within the city, takes centre stage in Easy Kill and Anderson wants to show me the scene of her latest crime.
The rain is teeming down. It is early afternoon, but the light has gone out of the day. All around us are monumental reminders of how brief the human span can be.
I do not mind admitting I am slightly spooked. The Necropolis is not a place where you would want to walk alone on this gloomiest of days, especially if you have an imagination as dark as Anderson's.
The novel opens with the grave of a respected father and citizen having been desecrated the body of a young prostitute is lying across it while, to add to the horror, the corpse of another working girl is discovered buried underneath.
It gets worse ... and worse ... and worse, so much so I can't go into detail in a family newspaper. "Let's say some bits were fiction. We don't want to give Glasgow too bad a name here," says Anderson, a bit late in the day.
Still, Dr MacLeod is on the case with the rest of the team and this time, she has a dishy Orcadian psychologist called Magnus to help her follow the clues into the bowels of the city, literally and figuratively.
"if you make people as real as you can, I think it makes it scarier," she says. "Quite often, you get people saying, Oh, that was a very dark scene', but when you actually go back and look they have put in the extra bits themselves. I think it is in the imagination of the reader.
"As a writer, you have control, so it is not so scary for you."
"And what I have written is nothing compared to the reality of what happened to the murdered Glasgow prostitutes."
But she admits when she reads the works of others, she gets quite scared.
"Val McDermid is very scary and so is Karin Slaughter, but I really like their writing.
"But you have to remember that all crime books, although they are deep and dark, have an underlying theme of justice.
"And as a writer, you get this wonderful feeling you can fix things even though in the real world, it is impossible. You know you are going to get the murderers and can do your bit to make things right. If I was an ordinary policeman, I couldn't do that. "
A lot of women read crime, says Anderson, though she treasures the comment of a male fan at a book festival who advanced on her with his wife.
Anderson recalls: "He said, At last, I meet the woman I share my bed with.' I think he'd been saving up that line."
In the new novel she has given the city's Molendinar Burn a starring role in the life or death chase to find the serial killer.
"My husband, John, is a Glaswegian, whose old school was St Kentigern's, right beside where the Molendinar comes up in Duke Street."
The former Great Eastern Hotel also features strongly. Anderson was not allowed into the building but she saw the plans and has been able to write with authority about what lies in its depths.
She is particularly grateful to David Robertson, the council's expert on the Molendinar and the Victorian-built culverts.
"Because of health and safety, I was not allowed down it, but David sat through a video of it with me. The way I have described it is the way it looks inside. It is stunning.
"He could not believe his good fortune that he got to spend an afternoon with a woman who was more excited by the Molendinar than he was."
Brought up in Greenock, Anderson now lives round the corner from crime writer Ian Rankin in Merchiston, Edinburgh. She and John, who have two grown-up sons and a daughter, also have a house in Carrbridge, near Aviemore.
Anderson, 57, has a degree in maths from Glasgow University, a masters in education from Edinburgh University, and a masters in screen writing at Napier University.
She has also taken an evening class diploma in forensic medical science diploma at Glasgow University. There were two crime writers there - herself and Alex Gray.
She has taught in Glasgow, Orkney and Nigeria, and was head of computing at George Watson's College in Edinburgh - and is proud of the fact she was Olympic cyclist Chris Hoy's form teacher.
Right back from primary in Larkfield, Greenock, she had written little plays and was always determined to write a book.
The one after Easy Kill is called Final Cut and is due out in the summer. She is already researching the one after that, The Reborn. Fans of Rhona MacLeod can be assured there is life in her for a while yet.
- Easy Kill, Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99
