Q : Attractive, charismatic, inspirational, an intellectual giant, none of these words have been used to describe you. That's not a question, it's just a statement. So tell us about your new book?

CB : Well, it`s called The Horse With My Name and it's about….a horse with my name. It's the fifth novel to feature Dan Starkey - the series started with Divorcing Jack which was actually written back in '92 - although it wasn`t published until '95 - so I've been writing about Dan for ten years now. He`s still the most fun to write because he's closest in character - although of course wildly exaggerated as well - to me. He's well meaning but inclined to stupidity, which kind of sums me up.

Q: And what does Dan get up to this time?

CB: I moved to live in the Irish Republic a couple of years ago, initially out in horse racing country, and thought I might spend some time thoroughly researching the horse racing industry as the background to the next Dan Starkey adventure, but as it was I got quite inspired very early on and wrote the whole book within three months of moving down. Kind of on the hoof, if you`ll excuse the pun. I hate describing what books are about, or what they`re like, but if you imagine Dick Francis writing a novel after he`d taken a lot of speed, then you probably have the general picture. Although clearly Dick Francis would never take speed.

Q: This is your fifth Dan Starkey novel out of ten novels - are you going to continue with the series?

CB: Like I say, Dan is very close to my heart, so I think I`ll always write stories for him, but it will probably be a couple of years until the next one appears. I do like to try and write different books as well - for example the next book to come out will be Murphy`s Law, which is about a Belfast cop working undercover in London. The title may be familiar to some people already - I wrote a TV film last year featuring the same character which went down extremely well - about seven million viewers I think - but as with most things you do for the screen, what you have to leave out is inevitably what you find most interesting about the character or the story. So I went back and wrote it as a proper novel, even changing the main character`s Christian name to differentiate between his TV life and his novel life. I think - I hope - readers will find Murphy as attractive as they do Starkey, because I`d like to go back and write a whole series of novels about him. Incidentally the TV people were more than pleased with the figures, so there`s four new ninety minute films on the way.

Q : And after Murphy?

CB: I`m just finishing off a novel called Chapter & Verse, which grew out of a short story I was asked to write for The Irish Times the Christmas before last. It was about a writer and his miserable life and his miserable relationship with his publisher and his agent.

Q: Clearly a work of fiction, then.

CB: Clearly. Anyway, I enjoyed the short story so much that I just kept writing and it has turned into one of my longer novels - I think it`s funny and romantic and sad. And there`s hardly any violence in it at all - I`m obviously entering my sad pipe and slippers years. Although it`s about a year away from being published it has been bought by the BBC and I`ve adapted it into a six part series which hopefully will get made some time next year.

Q: You seem to be writing increasingly for television?

CB: Well, first of all I love writing novels. That`s always number one. I also am a huge movie buff, and I`ve written the screenplays for three movies, which I think are all reasonably good movies - but the problem is nobody gets to see them. You get about two British movies a year which do well, the others limp around the festival circuit for a while and then disappear. If I give you an example of the film Wild About Harry which I wrote, and which I really like, I think it`s a good, low budget British film which people would enjoy if they got the chance to see it. But unless someone is prepared to spend millions hyping it, nobody will. I spent five years getting the script for Wild About Harry to the point where it could be filmed, it was filmed in six weeks, then spent two years waiting for distribution, then opened and closed on about ten screens in one week. That`s seven years, and not more than a couple of thousand people saw it. Compare that to Murphy`s Law, which was written and filmed within one year and seen by over seven million. That`s why TV is so attractive.

Q: To go back to the beginning: Divorcing Jack has become a bit of a legend in publishing circles because it`s one of the few books which was discovered on a slush pile.

CB: Yes. On a pile of slush outside the publishers, damp and……well I suppose it is a pretty amazing story, and should give hope to everyone who`s slaving away trying to write a book, while secretly convinced that it will never be published. Although I`d always dreamed of being a writer, I`d convinced myself it was impossible because poetry confused me and literary fiction sent me to sleep, so I was reading a lot of detective novels - and in particular Robert B Parker`s Spencer novels which I really enjoyed but which were so simply written. I thought it was a style I could copy. So I started writing Divorcing Jack armed only with a smart title and no real idea what direction I was going in. but determined just to have fun. And before I was very far into it I think I`d discovered my own style, more or less by accident. The approach for most of my characters remains very much the same today: what would a very ordinary person do when placed in an extraordinary situation. In most novels you will find them acting in a heroic fashion. In mine they generally run away, or resolve a situation by accident, which I think is much truer to the real world. However - to get back to the story - I finished Divorcing Jack in 1992 and because I`d absolutely no confidence in it I sent it to a small publisher in Belfast, thinking that at least they would read it and let me know how truly crap it was. I was wrong, of course. They didn`t read it, just held onto it for six months then sent it back unread. So I started sending it out to agents in the UK, like all the guide books tell you, but it was sent back by everyone. No interest at all. Then my girlfriend finally persuaded me to let her read it - I thought if agents and publishers didn`t like it, then there was no way a mere mortal would - but to my surprise she loved it and insisted on me sending it to the biggest publisher I could find. So it went to HarperCollins and into what I always imagined was a huge warehouse full of lousy unpublished novels. But amazingly someone found it, liked it, recommended it, passed it up the food chain to the point where I got a phone call saying they were really interested. So there was a nervous few weeks until they offered me a contract. And then they entered a badly photocopied manuscript - with my original pre-spellcheck spelling - for the Betty Trask Prize, which despite sounding like something out of Coronation Street, is actually one of the richest literary prizes in the UK, and it went and won that, and so my career got off to a flying start. And it`s all been downhill from there.

Q: But you`re with a new publisher now?

CB: Yes, clearly. Headline have promised me great things - a small Caribbean island, sleeping with their first born, endless publicity trips to far off places like Australia and Stoke, and the royal order of the boot if I don`t sell enough copies to make their investment worthwhile. It`s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.