Douglas Lindsay

Douglas Lindsay was born in Scotland in 1964 at 2:38a.m. There is some dispute over the weather conditions at the time. He spent the first few years of his life being an "if I'd had him first I wouldn't have had another one" kind of a kid. Even now he shows no remorse over this behaviour.

Some decades later he left Scotland to live in Belgium for a while. In the interim period he had been to watch Meadowbank Thistle a lot, including their famous 1-1 draw with Rangers in the League Cup semi-final (a game that might have meant something had not the first leg been lost 4-0). In Belgium he met his wife, Kathryn, and he took the opportunity to drop out of regular employment and join her on a Foreign Office posting to Senegal, West Africa. It was here that he developed the character of Barney Thomson, based on a funny wee man who he'd used to visit in a barbershop once a month in his home town.

Since the late 1990's, he has written seven Barney Thomson novels. The first in the series, The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson, has been translated into German, Italian, French and Hungarian. Some of the later titles have also appeared in foreign language editions.

He now lives in the south of England and divides his time between writing books and film scripts, and running after two children. He likes to think of himself as their dad, but they are more likely to see him as "some bloke who lives with us and who shouts if we start throwing food at the dinner table".