After twenty-five years in further education, I left Glasgow to live on the Rhine, where I wrote 'Dimity McKee and the Bad Lord Lionel.'

The idea of my Owlsgate 35s is simply to accommodate a good number of themes and topics for the classic works I'm writing about, treating them essentially as mini-lectures.

I'm now preparing to bring out my three novels about Sophie Rathenau later in 2015. Sophie, who works in Vienna in the 1770s, makes a living solving problems for people in difficult circumstances, but generally ends up in more severe ones herself.