Women's voices were the soundtrack of Christopher Brookmyre's childhood.

Growing up in Barrhead, Renfrewshire, he listened contentedly to women talking and laughing and, on occasion, arguing. "Strong, opinionated women were all around me," says the 46-year-old best-selling, award-winning novelist.

Those very vocal women included his teacher mother and his sister, "who as we say in Glasgow disnae miss and hit the wall," his maternal grandmother and various aunts, but also all his teachers at St Mark's Primary School. "Wee boys of my generation grew up hearing nothing but women's voices," he says when we meet over excellent coffee and home-made mince pies - his mum's - at his Bothwell home. He lives in a converted Victorian schoolhouse with his wife, Marisa, whom he met when they were students at Glasgow University, and their 15-year-old son, Jack.

He's still listening to women, particularly Marisa, formerly a consultant anaesthetist, who has just graduated with an MA in History. "Down the years, my wife has always had a view about my work. Early on in my career, when I knew everything - ha! ha! - I'd write myself into a corner and we'd go down the pub and talk about it. We don't do that so much now - much to her relief, I guess, as my plots have grown ever more complicated.

"My wife's still my first reader - a fresh pair of eyes. We haven't collaborated as such, although we plan to. When she was researching the history of medicine for her Masters, she uncovered an amazing, untold story that we plan to write together. But her perspective has always been really useful to me. She's a great sounding board," he says, adding that he enjoys the company of women. "Since childhood, I've never felt very laddish. I've never understood that thing where lads start fighting and grabbing each other around the neck. I'm really not interested in the macho perspective," confides Brookmyre, a former journalist, who began writing fiction while working shifts as a sub-editor in Edinburgh.

The female voice is the siren song of his latest psychological thriller, his 18th. Dead Girl Walking is set in the rock music industry, in which Monica, a young fiddle player from Shetland, who may or may not be an innocent abroad, shares the narration following the mysterious disappearance of a charismatic female rock star, Heike Gunn. The novel is a compelling read - particularly Monica's take on the allure and shame of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll - as we've come to expect from Brookmyre, whose books have sold more than 1.5m copies worldwide since his acclaimed debut, Quite Ugly One Morning, almost 20 years ago.

The big news for Brookmyre devotees, however, is the fact that Jack's back - Jack Parlabane, that is. The maverick investigative journalist and all-round action man, first encountered in Quite Ugly One Morning, returns in Dead Girl Walking, almost broken but still unbowed, to investigate Heike's disappearance.

"For me, as a journalist and long before the Leveson Inquiry into press standards, Jack was always a bit of a wish-fulfillment figure so he became a bit too good at what he did in previous books," Brookmyre confesses. (Parlabane's underhand hacking methods were uncannily prescient of the unscrupulous activities of some tabloid journos.) "But I've realised that people relate more to damaged characters, so I've treated him very badly; I've humbled him."

Even Jack's marriage - to anaesthetist Sarah Slaughter, ex-wife of the murder victim in Quite Ugly One Morning - had become boring, continues Brookmyre. "I've knocked him off his perch and he and Sarah are separated. So this isn't the usual knockabout, wildly humorous Jack. People might root for him a bit more now, though, find him more believable. Basically, it's a reboot of the character."

Nonetheless, Brookmyre - raised a Catholic but a convert to Humanism - stresses the story is always paramount, whether he's writing in the crime genre or, as more recently, blackly comic sci-fi in his 2013 novel Bedlam, which he wrote after computer games designers RedBedlam asked if he'd be interested in working with them on a video game. He's always been a keen gamer, although now his son is the big games freak - he's even written some scenes and voiced certain characters in the Bedlam game, much to his father's patent delight. Dead Girl Walking does have a couple of thrilling action sequences, however, that are worthy of any game - one involves Parlabane escaping the heavies while birling around Berlin's U-Bahnhof, another has him and his female companion abseiling inside the Reichstag dome.

Brookmyre's pacy story speeds from London to Barcelona to a remote Scottish island via Berlin, a city he had never visited until he was despatched there on a publicity tour since he's "big" in Germany. "I walked everywhere, mapping out the action in my head, then hurrying back to my hotel room to write. I didn't want it just to be cool eye-candy. It's haunted by history, stalked by it. You feel you have to pay attention because this was once a divided city. But the story always comes first, not the setting or the characters. I only ever want to write about things I'm interested in and passionate about, like music. It's an industry in which jaw-dropping practices are rife."

A supporter of independence, though not a political animal, he's a devoted St Mirren supporter and self-confessed anorak when it comes to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. He's always been into rock music and at a certain age wanted to be a rock star, although his voice is "far too plaintive for heavy metal." His novel A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away is about frustrated rock-star dreams and the moral compromises that people make in order to be successful. "It's a business I would never have been able to survive in," he admits, adding that he also wanted to look at the media's predatory attitude to women, especially female celebrities in rock'n'roll.

"I always try to write women characters as honestly as I can. I think that a lot of male crime writers create women as they would like them to be - fantasy women. It's because they haven't paid attention. Also, guys reckon the world of rock'n'roll is theirs, so they don't understand the way Monica and Heike feel in Dead Girl Walking; they are not going to suffer the sort of emotional pressures and press intrusion women are subject to."

Among Brookmyre's other very readable novels is his Jasmine Sharp series, featuring a female private eye - Emma Thompson has expressed interest in playing her in a projected TV series - alongside Detective Superintendent Catherine McLeod. The latter makes a cameo appearance in Dead Girl Walking, a device Brookmyre is particularly fond of. Indeed, Spammy - from Country of the Blind and Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks - and photographer Steff Kennedy, hero of Not the End of the World, also have walk-on roles. "I like to recycle," laughs Brookmyre.

"I do a lot of geeky, anoraky crossovers to previous books to please readers who might be feeling a wee bit snubbed by the Jasmine Sharps. They are set in the Glasgow underworld and there's always the temptation among male crime writers to be impressed by that scene. I deliberately chose to write from the point of view of a woman who is definitely not impressed by violence or by hard men. I try to avoid all the tropes of violence against powerless women."

Who are his readers? Would fans of books in which Parlabane, say, once disemboweled a dead man and used his intestines as a climbing rope to abseil down a building, feel "Bad Boy" Brookmyre has mellowed?

"When I do events at book festivals, the majority of the audience is female. I don't get so many late teens, who'd turn out for A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away or Pandaemonium, both of which are full of video game allusions. The Jasmine Sharp books are more mainstream, so fans of those might get quite a shock if they explored the back catalogue. Mellowed? I do think my books have become more morally complex, emotionally darker than they were before I discovered that I didn't know everything! I don't channel my anger into my prose anymore. It slows the plot too much. It jars. In the past I didn't worry whether it chimed with characters or not because the readers liked it that way, too.

"Mind, I often still feel quite ranty and angry, so some characters hold very strong opinions."

A hugely prolific writer, Brookmyre is a home bird. He still goes to music gigs - he's into American indie rockers We Are Augustines - but says he doesn't have that many friends or go out a lot. He's far too busy writing, has a slew of novels on the go and reckons it'll be at least two years before he and Marisa collaborate on that cracking story she's unearthed.

Meanwhile, he's wrestling with a first: a book with a complex female villain at its heart. "People kept telling me that that was missing from my work. But it certainly won't be a scenario where it's a helpless woman and a man to the rescue."

Dead Girl Walking by Chris Brookmyre (Little, Brown, £18.99).