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Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.

Having written for film and television, I had little interest in turning 'The Good Father' into a Hollywood thriller. I was writing a novel, and novels demand that the writer goes deeper, both emotionally and thematically.

I have been reading crime books ever since I was a child, but I had never tried to write one.

I definitely have an affection for detective fiction, and when I first read Dashiell Hammett's 'The Maltese Falcon,' that book and its author made an enormous impression on me as a reader and a writer, and led me to other hard-boiled American writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross McDonald, among many.

My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that.

Right from the very beginning, I knew I wanted to write palpably Scottish fiction.

The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.

I think the novel form chose me. I was a writer before I became a criminal... my first instinct was to write.

I wanted to make a film about my dad, a sort of love letter, and explain what I understood of his cinema, which was so utopian. I also wanted to give the sense of his cinema, because they have never been very big box-office, but they were very influential.