The Hour

For osteopath Caro Ramsay, killing comes easy. "You know when you’re on the phone to a call centre and they’re just leaving you…" she said. "That’s when I sit down and think: ‘You’ve got to die’. It’s very cathartic, very calming…"

Fortunately Caro’s victims aren’t living people, but fictional characters in her popular crime novels, two of which she wrote while confined to a hospital bed.

"I really, really hurt my back and ended up in hospital for months on end, and anybody who has been in hospital for months just knows just how frustrating it is. So I lay there, and I thought I was going to start killing other people in the ward. So someone thankfully brought me a pad and a pen and I just sat and wrote a quarter of a million words before I got better and that was my first two novels."

Absolution and Singing to the Dead became best sellers and Caro reduced her hours working as an osteopath so that she could spend half of her time writing and the other half in the surgery. Her latest novel, Dark Water, was written in this new spare time that she had.

"It’s a very complicated book and thankfully it’s got rave reviews," she said. "But it starts off about ten years ago. A girl was very brutally attacked and the police think they’ve got the guy that’s done it and put him in jail and then the same thing starts happening again ten years later."

Caro has always had an attraction to crime fiction. As a child she read Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven and Famous Five, and as she got older she moved on to Agatha Christie. "I don’t have a problem thinking about horrific scenarios," she said.

As far as inspiration goes, she joked: "Scottish men, believe me. We’ve got a lot to put up with. To inspire killing…"

Perhaps it is this sort of comment that made Jeff Lindsay, author of the famously gruesome Dexter series, afraid to be alone with her.

"I was once at the Harrogate Crime Festival, at this lift, and Jeff Lindsay was in it," she told The Hour. "And I paused just because it was him - you know, he’s a massive superstar - and he said ‘Are you scared to get into the lift with me?’ And I said ‘No’, and he said, ‘Cause I’m kinda scared you are going to get in the lift with me!’"

Terrifying though her writing is, she remains a proper lady to the last. During one research outing she tried to discover whether a woman in stilettos and a tight skirt can climb out of a skip. "Now you can’t ask anybody can you do that, you have to try it. So my faithful PA and I went to try it and I got stuck."

Covered in garbage she may be have been, but given the reviews of her latest book it seems unlikely she’ll be finding her own work in the skip any time soon.

MORE TO DIE FOR

• The Hour’s interview with Jeff Lindsay
• Visit STV’s Living pages