Double delight for fans of Quintin's cop

In the autumn he sent off the manuscript for Skinner’s 28th outing which will be published later this year.

Before that Skinner investigates the murder of a footballer’s supermodel wife in Game Over, which is released in April, after the idea was sparked by a chat with a fan.

Quintin said: “I have a reader who is a footballer. I found out he was a reader because he gave me a name check in his autobiography.

“I called him at the club he was with and we had a chat. He said to me, ‘Listen, there is a great story in football’.

“Well, the next Skinner is called Game Over and there are footballers in it. Things like that get planted in your head.”

Despite having written two novels the public have yet to read, Quintin has immediately thrown himself back into work.

He said: “I am doing an extra Skinner for the next two years, so I have given myself a bit of a schedule.

“Normally I would have taken about four months off, but this time I need to get into this straight away.”

Quintin lives some of the year in Spain with his wife Eileen, but for her sake is planning changes to how he works.

He said: “Up till now I’ve probably done more work in Spain. I am going to try to reverse that. It is not much fun for Eileen when I’m locked away for hours.

“I’m a bear when I’m writing: you don’t want to live with me, especially as it gets going.”

Skinner debuted in 1993, but Quintin says there is little autobiographical about the character.

He said: “Skinner is not all me. We have the same background, except my father was a teacher not a lawyer, and we were both brought up in Motherwell.

“You meet cops as a journalist. That’s how I started out in life, I can still remember the names of half the cops in Motherwell.

“At the end of the day we all make it up.”