The reviewer was Marcel Berlins; sure enough, the novel he had flagged up was Black & Blue.

He wasn’t wrong, either – when November came round, my eighth Inspector Rebus adventure picked up the Gold Dagger Award for the best crime novel published in 1997. It went on to be shortlisted for the American equivalent, the Edgar (named after Edgar Allan Poe – I lost out to James Lee Burke), and also won Denmark’s Palle Rosenkrantz Prize. Eventually it would end up on the school syllabus in Scotland, and a lecturer at St Andrews University would publish a book-length critique of its themes.

So what the hell is it that made Black & Blue so different from my previous efforts?

Well, for one thing, the book looked different. My publishers, Orion, had found a spooky photo of some trees, and had added a new, bold typeface to the cover, making Black & Blue look more than a crime novel. They were also prepared to put some muscle into promoting the book, with posters and advertisements. But more than this, to my mind the book was simply bigger and better than my previous work: I felt I’d served my apprenticeship. It was as if all the previous Rebus novels had been leading to this. I would no longer confine my detective to Edinburgh and its environs. He would visit Glasgow, Aberdeen, Shetland – even an oil installation hundreds of miles out in the unforgiving North Sea. Oil would be a theme of the book, allowing me to examine Scotland’s industrial decline and reshaping. Difficult to discuss oil without bringing politics into the equation, so the book would be political too. And Rebus would swell in stature. I would put his reputation, career and life on the line. I’d have intertwined narratives, with various sub-plots dodging in and out of the main story.

And I would do all this while using as my backdrop a series of real-life unsolved murders from thirty years before – and bringing that killer into the books as a character. Almost a decade on, I still think this an audacious ploy. And Bible John has yet to sue me for libel.

Yet the book itself kicked off with a bottle or three of wine and a friend from Australia …

The friend’s name was Lorna. She’d been at university with me in Edinburgh, and we’d stayed in touch. She was living in the Antipodes, working as a teacher, but made occasional trips back to Europe to visit her family. And she came to stay with us for a week at our rural hovel in south-west France. One night, after a big meal and all that wine, we settled down on the sofa and she told me a story. It was something that had happened to her brother. He’d been working on an oil platform, and had returned to Edinburgh for some R&R. Met these two guys in a pub and they said they were heading to a party. He could go with them if he liked. But when they arrived at the abandoned flat … well, he started to sober up fast. Not fast enough, though. They tied him to a chair, taped a plastic bag over his head … and walked out. Eventually he was able to rip his hands free, tear the bag open, and run gasping to the nearest police station. The cops accompanied him back to the abandoned tenement flat, but couldn’t explain what had happened. He hadn’t been robbed; the modus operandi was new to the officers; there was no motive for the assault …