They say write what you know. That's what they say, but I wasn't doing that until I started The Big Blind. Before that, I was writing about a diner somewhere in Los Angeles, populated with characters who weren't quirky or sad enough to appear in a Tom Waits song. I was sending these stories to my then-girlfriend-now-wife while she was still in the States. She liked 'em, but that was about it. I wasn't satisfied. I'd written half a novel called God's Army which must have made her think I was a borderline psychotic.

In short, I wasn't writing what I knew. So I tried it. Anything for a giggle.

The Big Blind came from two strains of experience. I'd sold double-glazing at one point, albeit not for very long. My patter was awful, my conscience too well-developed to make it a vocation, but I picked up enough lingo to avoid the sack. The second came from a couple of years working as a croupier in a Salford casino. I learned all the games I could, ended up in the card room for the poker competitions, held on Wednesdays and Sundays. They'd start at nine, finish at two, and then there was another couple of hours of dealing craps to the same guys I'd spent elbow-to-elbow with for most of the night. These were normally double shifts, sixteen hours in total, and natural light was a myth.

I don't know how far most people's casino experience goes, but if you walk into a British club and expect Las Vegas, you're going to be sorely disappointed. Most British casinos are dingy affairs. The casinos in The Big Blind are all based on places I used to work, but the names have been changed to protect the innocent - though anyone with a vague knowledge of Manchester's nightlife will probably recognise them. In truth, these places weren't as bad as I've painted them, but to me it was like some new circle of hell after a while. I saw the same faces day in, day out. I knew who was likely to kick off at the table, who was likely to top-hat the roulette layout, who'd knock chips off a number and demand a camera check. As time went on, I got to know the poker punters too.

Les Beale was a real guy. Different name, of course. But he was my first punter. My first night, I'd screwed up so badly on Roulette (I couldn't spin the ball, my hands were shaking that badly), the sympathetic pit boss put me on a Blackjack table. After I'd shuffled the six decks (this was before the shuffling machines took over), I asked this bull-headed guy in front of me if he wanted to cut the cards.

"Nah," he said. "But I'll cut your fuckin' throat."

The man behind him was squat, piggy-eyed, had a moustache that wouldn't look out of place on a teenager, and he looked like he'd follow up on the threat if the bloke in front of me got too drunk to take care of it himself. They meshed together and became Beale.

As it turned out, the guy was joking. And that was the way it worked. Poker punters had that same sense of humour. But when you're pressed up tight against them in a card room with a capacity of fifty, holding a hundred, you tend to feel like the joke's on you. If you've seen Late Night Poker, you'll get an idea of some of the players. In fact, I used to deal to a couple of them, and they're on their best behaviour when the cameras are on them. A mate of mine once dealt to the Devil Fish himself, supposed to be ice-cold, but this mate heard Fish say, "I am the Devil Fish, I am the Devil Fish, I am the Devil Fish..."

"I am the Devil Fish." To me, that sums up most of the guys I dealt to, the culture of the hardcore poker player. It's all about image, self-belief to the point of mental illness and, as the song goes, knowing when to hold 'em and knowing when to fold 'em. The rules of Texas Hold 'Em (the main comp game) are incredibly simple, but it takes a lifetime to master it, and luck can still fuck you up on the river. It's a precarious existence, an incredible strain on a man's sanity and finances. And it was a perfect situation to find our double-glazing salesmen, Alan and Les.

I left the casino shortly after a bunch of Salford villains drove a truck through the wall one night and hopped out with sawn-offs. They didn't get anything, it was a tremendous adrenalin boost pelting it out of the club, but afterwards we all talked about how they screwed it up, how they should have organised the robbery better. None of that features in The Big Blind, but it will hopefully find its way into Double Down (otherwise known as The Graham Ellis Story).

When the wife told me to put it down on paper, I did (she's very persuasive like that). But The Big Blind was a hard book to write. Ken Bruen once said that writing was his .45, the best kind of therapy, and The Big Blind proved to be the same for me. It started off not as a noir novel, but something altogether more literary. I was sending my wife the book chapter by chapter. She still has the emails where I'm whining that it's too hard, too bloody difficult to write a book, piss and moan, piss and moan. She keeps them for whenever I get petulant about whatever I'm currently working on. She's fantastic like that.

So when I got to the end, that was it. All out. And I started sending it off to agents, publishers. Got nowhere. Nobody wanted it. Some of them were rave rejections, others responded with indignant cries of "Where's the mystery?" My wife told me to keep at it (she'll say she nagged me), had more faith in this one book than I did. So I did. When I'd gone through The Writer's Handbook with no result, I decided to shelve it, work on something else. On a whim, though, I submitted a couple of opening chapters to Al Guthrie's Noir Originals site. He really liked it. When Al became commissioning editor of the PointBlank imprint, he asked me if I'd had any luck with the book. I told him I hadn't; I'd shelved it. Would I be interested in having PointBlank publish it? Yeah, it was a small press, there wouldn't be an advance, but would I still be interested?

Bet your balls to a penny, I would.

That was March of 2004. Since then, I've worked with a superb editor in Al Guthrie, a man who edits with a scalpel, not a hatchet, and proves those wrong who say you can't polish a turd. The book changed a little here, a lot there (messing with the timeline was his idea) and I read it enough times to end up liking it. And all through it, my wife said, "Told you it was good enough."

Like I said, The Big Blind started off literary, ended up noir. I've always loved noir. Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me (which, along with Fight Club, has one of the best unreliable narrators) had a profound effect, as did Willeford and Eddie Little. And I've always wondered how the British crime scene managed to become mired in police procedural and cosy. We're a dour country, rotten at the very core, but we don't seem to be able to get the pus out on the page, content to have shocking twists and neat conclusions. Writers like Bruen, Guthrie and Charlie Williams are trying to change that. Their characters aren't nice people, but they're infinitely more real than a dozen Wexfords. Because I don't want to read about goody-two-shoes detectives, coppers wearing their addictions like a badge of sympathy, hyperactive serial killers with quirky methods of dispatch and quaint little old ladies with talking cats who stumble over bodies in the fucking library. I want to read about the sick at heart, the dispossessed and those normal people who do something horribly wrong and have to pay the price for it. I don't want a corpse to be a plot point, and I tried my best to follow that through with The Big Blind. What I want is what the aforementioned authors provide: a direct link to Greek tragedy and the catharsis it provides. In life, there is no black and white, and noir to me is all about shades of grey.

Those guys tell us that all the time. And I'm glad they're there, because it makes me feel like I'm on the right track.

Or maybe I'm not. But what the fuck, it's cheaper than a psychiatrist.