The ideas for this story and for this wider new series appeared in my head a few years ago – I could see and hear one of the characters that you’re about to meet, in my head. 

Ian is originally from Livingston , West Lothian. He had a nine-year career in warehousing before losing his legs in a fire, aged 24, in 2002. After that tragedy he became a writer, historian and actor. In 2023 he was diagnosed AuDHD.

My AuDHD diagnosis from 2023, though a shock in some ways, has allowed me to unleash my imagination, whereas in the past as I wrote I was unwittingly masking, afraid of my imagination and thus trying to be neurotypical. I hope that the reader appreciates the change of direction .

This new series of books, Broken Biscuits, is set in the hinterland of Scotland in between the two main cities – the many towns and villages along the M8 and in Lanarkshire, West Lothian and the general central belt. Most locations are real. No characters are based on real people.

Broken Biscuits are people from working class housing estates, or schemes, as we call them in Scotland. We grew up in the post 1980s neoliberal wasteland, a transitional post-industrial era in which began the drugs plague, a plague which still infects our country today.

For the most part, there are three types of person born in the schemes. Some don’t make it, their lives cut short by violent crime, poverty or by drugs – either directly or indirectly. 

Some get away, be it via study, work or marriage – they escape. Most of us, however, stay in or near the places that we grew up in, surviving and thriving, making lives for ourselves in spite of the two-pronged assault that we face, from drugs and organised crime on the one hand, and from indifferent politicians and under-funded public services on the other. 

We are the Broken Biscuits that neoliberalism left behind.

It's not a derogatory term, at all. After all, broken biscuits, though often rough around the edges, are usually the best in the world – and we know how to have a laugh.