Q.How did you keep hold of the boyish wonder for the strange you must have had as a little 'un? You remind me of a pulp fiction Peter Pan…

I don't know! I never like to underestimate the capacity of people to surprise you with the most outlandish and outrageous things. I love the idea that people walk around looking fairly normal, but there's all this amazing stuff inside: all these secrets and ideas. I think it's a very serious and important responsibility – giving adults a potent dose of the bizarre.

Q. Do you feel you have a responsibility to shake up tired and bored imaginations?

I think that's what any writer should do. It's about taking people into your world and immersing them in your characters and their adventures. I like mixing the mundane and the fantastic, though.

Q.Yours in a special kind of magic because it can be found in the most 'ordinary' places – Fish and Chip shops, at the Bingo, in a supermarket or corner shop…we don't need to be sent to Hogwarts or find any hidden doors to other worlds in your books. What are your reasons for keeping things so real?

Because that's how, I think, magic happens when it does happen. I don't like stuff that proclaims itself bombastically: 'LOOK! THIS IS REALISM! IT'S SO REAL AND GRIMY AND AWFUL!' Or, equally: 'Look! Fantasy! Magic! There's an elf, LOOK!' So, yes - I prefer to mix it all in and get the sharpest of realism and the weirdest of dark fantasy through the juxtaposition and the contrast. It's funnier and more disturbing that way.

Q.Too often the cast in a novel are middle-class flakes with verbose mouths or city-slicker yuppy wine drinkers, sitting smug in minimalist apartments. You give a stage to a different lot – middle-aged working class women who might natter about their neighbours in a Bakers Oven, beefcake men covered head to toe in tattoos, has-been pop-singers and misfit kids… Why do you choose to give a voice to these people in particular?

It's natural to me. And I really wouldn't want to write about posh people competing with each other or twittering on. I just write about people who interest me. And I like putting them in bizarre combinations, too, and seeing them clash with each other. The middle class thing is hard, though - because I'm not that bothered about including obviously middle class characters. Difficult, when the novel itself is such a middle class thing. Those are the kinds of people readers expect to find. People expect to see themselves reflected, somehow, in the fiction they read. The novelist's job is to seduce them into empathising with characters who they feel very different from. The least imaginative fiction simply reminds them and backs them up in who they already are.

Q. I like the way your characters all exist together, like a soap opera. There's a cross-generational thing – old dears and young lads…You seem interested in what each can bring to the table. There's a prevailing sense of community in your work. Not just community but the mechanics of community…

Are you a people-watcher?

I suppose I am - and I'm really interested in the cross-generational thing. I write about older people sometimes because I think they can be very funny, wry, and sometimes subversive.

Q. Are there any types of people you are particularly interested or uninterested in? (And am I being flippant by using the word 'types'?

Many of your characters manage to both conform vigilantly to their expected roles and joyfully throw off their stereotypes with strip-show panache.)

I just like characters who have the capacity for change and growth and surprise. I like it when we see them at their best and at their worst. I like showing them going through a span of time during which everything flies up into the air - possibilities, mayhem, love and disaster - and seeing how they get through it. The only type I'd  not be interested in, perhaps, would be those who don't change, whatever happens to them. But then, that may be interesting in itself.

Q.  Your new book, Never the Bride, doesn't have an entirely new cast. We've seen Brenda and Effie elsewhere. And in your other fiction Iris pops up all over the shop. Sometimes your characters seem the same and sometimes they don't (but then again, Brenda is a common name). Anyway, there's something about your characters – Mark, Sally, Tony – that makes them so real that I imagine them all sitting in your very own green room, waiting to be called into whatever tale you need them for next. Tell us why these characters keep coming back… Have you invented them like the father invented Brenda, and now they have lives of their own?

These continuities and small migrations of characters are important to me. It's like building up a whole shadow-world of people to dip into, with each new story. But, though I've used their names and aspects of their characters before, Brenda and Effie appear fully-formed for the first time in Never the Bride (apart from the Radio 4 story that kickstarted their adventures). They live in a place - haunted Whitby - that stands in the centre of my imagination, though - for some reason. And I could imagine any of the other characters turning up, and getting caught up in one these ridiculous, supernatural adventures with them.

Q. Sell the book to us in a few words – or if you don't like to do the pitching thing, can you give us a quick overview of the tale?

It's Miss Marple with monsters. It's Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Alan Bennett. It's two old dears with shady pasts trying to settle down quietly in Whitby. They become best friends, but find that monsters, spectres and mysteries lurk around every misty corner. Brenda comes a cropper at a hellish boutique; there's cannibalism at the Christmas Hotel, and Effie is seduced by a dapper old man with dripping fangs.

Q. The chapter font in the book is very Tim Burton. What modern fairytale tellers do you rate?

I love Angela Carter and Roald Dahl; Marvel Comics of the Bronze Age and Doctor Who in all its incarnations; Edward Gorey and E.F Benson.

Q. Your production rate is mind-blowing. How many novels is it now? Do you have a dark secret? A pact with the devil perhaps, to bash out these brilliant books at phenomenal speed? What is your secret?

There's a bunch of them now - for adults, kids, teens and Doctor Who fans ( who transcend age and time, of course). I keep at it diligently - driven to do it. I just do what interests me - and that leads me to some very odd places. I've written books about murderous children; Iris Murdoch coming back from the dead, rubbish bands who win the Eurovision, tattooed men and fake ladies; film stars possessed by the devil, porno soap operas, monsters of all kinds, superheroes and time lords and the woman behind the deli counter in Marks and Spencers. There's seven novels for grown-ups behind me now, and it'll be fun when they can all be brought out again and someone republishes the backlist, and people can see that i've been building up this world with cross-currents and continuities. They all fit together like a weird, baroque jigsaw.

Q. Have you ever had writer's block?

I'd be annoyed if I did. I teach a lot and always have done - so I have to get the writing done when I can. The time is really fought for, so i've got this sense that I can't waste it or mess it up.

Q. Are you still writing in cafes around Manchester? What is it about writing in a café that helps you get the job done? Why not at home? (Or do you write at home?)

I used to write out and about a lot more. Great portions of Strange Boy (my first teen novel) were written in bars on Canal st in manchester through a long summer. I've also written at a desk in central library. Lately i've been writing at home - getting up very early and writing straight away on the computer. The method changes all the time, with every book, really. You just have to be alert to the best way to write for you, at any given time - and not to bully yourself into working the wrong way. There are no hard and fast rules. The important thing is just to get on with it, and not to fanny on.

Q. Often your books are set in the same North East you grew up in. How important is the environment to the author? Why do you continue to set your stories in your old stomping ground? And emotionally, how can you bear it?

I write about most places I've lived - the north east, edinburgh, norfolk, lancashire... it's hard to write about a town when you're actually living in it. It's best to recreate a time and a place from memory. Emotionally, it feels like salvaging bits and pieces that would be gone forever, otherwise.

Q. Are there any books that changed your life – or authors?

Reading Christopher Isherwood and J.D Salinger at 19; Anne Tyler and Armistead Maupin at 20; Angela Carter and Angus Wilson at 21. And the discoveries continue with every year. I never found Alice Munro till I was nearly 30! I didn't read E.F Benson till just this year!

Q. I read in a recent interview you might turn to crime fiction. I love whodunits. I know though, that whatever you write will have the same forceful empathy and wicked wit. (i) Why the sidestep into mystery/crime fiction, and (ii) are there any common themes in your books – bees that won't leave your bonnet etc, subjects you simply must exhaust or never tire from?

I think I was probably referring to Never the Bride, which isn't really crime - it's mystery adventure, if it's anything. I do like crime though - especially series, where we return to the characters and their worlds again and again. Crime is good because it's a mechanism that can bring huge, grand themes crashing into very ordinary, everyday life, at any given moment. For themes - I love time and love itself; revenge, betrayal, regret... mortifying secrets.

Q. You're well into your music. What you listening to these days?

I still love my exotica from the fifties and sixties. Martin Denny and all those cocktail people. Brenda listens to a lot of James Last, so we've had to have a lot of that. Charity shop box sets of vinyl. Belle and Sebastian are still my fave band, though. Serge Gainsbourg, Mercury Rev, Cilla Black, Momus.

Q. Tell us a secret. Or something about you we don't know and couldn't guess.

I bet there's nothing that couldn't be guessed. I reckon i'm pretty transparent from what's in the fiction.

Q. So would you really rather have a cup of milky tea in a seaside café than a seven quid bottle of red and a cheese board in some London penthouse? Or do you leave the peas and chips to your characters?

Mushy peas and red wine - the whole lot. Wherever you are.

Q. And lastly, of course, what is next for you?

I'm on with a sequel - further adventures for Brenda and Effie. Something Borrowed - even more lurid and incredible goings-on for the brave ladies of Whitby. And I've got a kids' book for next summer - Twin Freaks - about sisters who go in for a TV talent show and pretend to be singing siamese twins in order to get the sympathy vote.