"The new book, A BIG BOY DID IT AND RAN AWAY, it's ... if I was going to go for a slick marketing line I think I would go with "High Fidelity with machine guns"... because it deals with male adolescent obsessions and obsessiveness.

Mainly it's about two students, or what their aspirations were when they were students, and now, almost twenty years later, how they've reconciled that with what their lives have become.

Because when they're students they want to be rock stars, like everyone does at that age, and now... one of them has had a thousand different jobs but he's now started as an english teacher because it's cool for some kind of stability now that he's a father. And the other guy, he had a well-paid stable job in the oil industry almost from graduation, which drove him psychotic through living in suburban ... "suburban hell" would be polite to describe how he views it. So he started killing people for fun... and he found that he was really good at it. He'd sort of missed his vocation.

It escalates from killing them for fun to killing them for money, to killing huge amounts of them for money... and he becomes the most notorious international contract terrorist, who leaves calling cards as a marketing exercise. Because the more notorious he becomes, the more demand there is not only that the job be carried out, but if it's carried out by him it looks better for the terrorist group or organisation that's hired him.

The calling cards have this kind of amorphous black shape with eyes and a grit of teeth, and they've nicknamed him The Black Spirit as a result of that. Him and this other guy run into each other at the airport years later... or rather they see each other at the airport, but what's complicated is that the one who's a terrorist to everyone else's knowledge died 3 years before in a plane crash, so ... it all get's very complicated from there!

It deals with the rock 'n' roll thing... "terrorism is the new rock 'n' roll" was another suggested cover line. The guy's called Simon Darcourt, and he does things like gives codenames to all his accomplices so they don't know each other's names, but he always gives them the names of rock stars. He has a kind of rock 'n' roll attitude to it all. He's a really loathsome psychopathic individual, but with a fairly wicked sense of humour about sometimes who he kills for his own reasons rather than who he kills for money.

In this concluding mission he's on there's twelve in the team and they're split into units of four, so four of them are named after the four members of The Clash, four of them are named after the four original members of the Sex Pistols , but crucially four of them are named after the four members of Queen, to add an element of over-the-top camp to it which is highly appropriate because it's the most over-the-top thing I've ever written."