Meet the author: The Dead Won’t Sleep writer Anna Smith

Award-winning reporter-turned author Anna Smith has been up close and personal with the dark side of life.

But she admits she hadn’t read a single crime novel before penning her hugely successful Rosie Gilmour series, featuring the titular character, an intrepid Glasgow journalist.

With nine Gilmour thrillers under her belt, new book Fight Back is the second in her new series starring female crime boss Kerry Casey.

Glasgow-based Anna, who covered crime and wars from Somalia to Kosovo, and whose first Rosie Gilmour novel, The Dead Won’t Sleep, draws on her journalistic experiences of corruption and child abuse, tells P.S: “I never read crime before I wrote the Rosie books. They came out of my head because Rosie is really me, just a bit younger and a bit wilder.

“The back streets, drugs, prostitutes and all those horrible stories, gave me what I needed to create her character.

“But I wanted to get a break from that. My publisher suggested I write a gangland book.

“I thought let’s just sit down and try.

“I wrote Blood Feud. Kerry Casey came purely out of my imagination. I didn’t want to create someone – a woman – who was just coming in there and stabbing and shooting people. I wanted her to be a reluctant gangster.”

Readers first meet Kerry – a successful lawyer who has grown up away from the family crime business – in Blood Feud, at the funeral of her brother who had been head of the firm.

She reluctantly takes his place but, like her late father, dreams of turning the organisation “legit”.

In Fight Back she is now a fully-fledged gangland boss who, with her tough business partner Sharon and wily lawyer Marty, is trying to rid the organisation of the drug dealers and people traffickers her brother brought-in.

But Kerry has deadly rivals who want to see the Caseys destroyed and she is facing the fight of her life.

Anna, who is currently penning End Game, the final book in the triology, reveals: “What amazes me is that although the Rosie books do very well, the gangland books do even better.

“I can’t believe the appetite that’s out there. People can’t get enough of hard-boiled gangland criminals.

“There’s a lot of literary snobbery about them.

“Sometimes there isn’t the respect for the Martina Cole/ Kimberley Chambers-type novels, but people love to buy them.

“I am enjoying the fact that readers fell for Kerry.

“I wasn’t sure I could do it for a start.”

Surely then the hotly anticipated End Game isn’t the last we will see of Kerry and her cohorts?

“There might be one more, maybe a spin-off,” she hints.

Watch this space…

Anna Smith, Fight Back, Quercus Books, £7.99