Liam McIlvanney's close up on Glasgow crime is viewed from afar

He reveals this unlikely trait while discussing his new thriller, Where The Dead Men Go. This is a work so pared back and economical, it's as if an injunction against adjectives has been slapped on him. When I ask if he was deliberately holding himself back, he gives a rueful smile: "The thing I need to guard against is my tendency to showboat. I do that on the football park as well. I needed to rein that side of things in.

"Also, there's a question of generic requirements of the crime novel. Although someone like Chandler is one of the finest prose stylists of his age, to some extent you can over-egg that in crime fiction." He pauses. "But I may find I've thrown the baby out with the bath water and have left myself with nothing, having knocked out the stained glass windows, as James Kelman would say."

Did I say you can't tell he's a professor? I meant only when he isn't talking. In conversation, McIlvanney lobs literary references as if he's facing down Federer. He also has a talent for an arresting turn of phrase, a trait he shares with his father, renowned novelist William McIlvanney. There, however, the comparison ends.

Though he must find it irksome, one is obliged to ask what it's like to publish fiction in the shadow of his father, not to mention his uncle Hugh, the distinguished sports journalist.

"I suppose, perhaps shortsightedly, I didn't use my old man," he says, folding his arms a little defensively across his chest. "I never showed him any of my stuff, or asked him any advice, but I just felt it was better to step back from that. I suppose it was inevitable [I would be asked about him], particularly writing crime."

His expression eases. "I always enjoyed living in England, when I did my PhD at Oxford, where if anyone did recognise the name, they'd say 'Oh, are you related to Hughie?' It's quite nice living in New Zealand where nobody can pronounce your damn name let alone appreciate its significance."

Was the move a way of putting distance between his career and his father's?

"Yeah. Not that it's particularly claustrophobic here, but it's that thing, the old Scottish thing. 'I kent yer faither' was quite literal in my case."

And does he ever talk to his father about his writing?

"We don't really discuss books much at all, in fact," he replies, saying that when they met the day before, they mainly discussed family. "On the one hand, obviously having a father who was a writer, making a living, however tenuously as a writer, showed you that that's a viable option. At the same time, it was quite an unliterary upbringing.

"My old man was never a clubbable literary person. His friends were never writers, he was never part of a literary scene. And of course he left when I was ten or something, so you didn't have that sort of sense of a literary hinterland. Which sounds kind of odd, people think you were born to do this, but it wasn't really like that."

As his novels show, however, the trade is in the blood. McIlvanney writes effortlessly, quickly setting a scene and conjuring an atmosphere. Perhaps his greatest strength is in character. Each of the multifarious players in his latest book is memorable, no mean feat in such a kaleidoscopic and closely-wrought tale.

The sequel to his warmly received debut, All The Colours Of The Town, this new tale sees the disgraced hero of that novel, Gerry Conway, return to his beat as a reporter with The Tribune, a Glasgow Sunday newspaper eerily similar to the Herald's sister title. When Gerry's erstwhile protege, Martin Moir, now the paper's star investigative journalist, is found drowned in a quarry, he feels honour-bound to find out whether it was suicide or murder. In so doing, he is embroiled in the city's violent underworld, whose links with Northern Ireland continue the vein he followed in his first novel.

The image McIlvanney paints of contemporary Glasgow is hardly flattering. Since he has committed what he calls "the cardinal sin of getting the hell out", one wonders if he sees his homeland more clearly, or less forgivingly, from a distance?

"There's certainly plenty of precedents for writing about a place from a distance. I'm thinking of Stevenson writing about Scotland from Samoa, or David Peace writing these great Yorkshire books from Japan.

"But I suppose the question is, is it sustainable to write topical thrillers when your day-to-day knowledge of a place is becoming more and more attenuated. I'm in Glasgow for about a month every year, so I'm not deeply divorced. But to some extent what you're trying to do with a novel is to simplify and clarify reality. I'm a great believer in that thing Stevenson says, the novel is not competing with life.

"I think that's absolutely right. The first task as a writer is to screen out irrelevant data and then to make some patterns with the facts that you have left. That's probably easier to do if you're approaching a culture at a distance, to some extent as an outsider."

When asked if he thinks Scotland could be infected by the virus of sectarianism that has dogged Northern Ireland, as hinted in his novel, he shakes his head.

"I think it's an interesting thing to explore in the form of a novel but that doesn't necessarily mean I think it's a huge burning issue in Scottish society generally. There's also that sense in which 'the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk' - that when the event is finished, the Troubles are over, that's when you get the literature that looks back and tries to interpret it. The dust has to an extent settled on that period that was quite shaping both for the west of Scotland and north of Ireland, and it's in this kind of period that writers get to work."

But while his novel is riven with criminal and political tensions, and the world it portrays is dark and dangerous - not least his fictional newsroom - at its heart is a powerful story of quite another sort. Gerry has two sons by his former wife, and a toddler with his new partner. As he investigates his colleague's death, the reader follows the parallel tale of his uneasy home life, and his bond with his boys. Fatherhood, it's evident, is as important a theme for him as catching killers, for which he makes no apologies.

"I've always been fascinated by domesticity as a topic for writing," he says, pouring more tea. "The most fun I ever had teaching was when I taught a course on writing the family in American fiction. It had Cheever, and Franzen's The Corrections, and De Lillo's White Noise, and so on.

"I've been fascinated by the extent to which that's often seen as a women writer's remit, to write about the domestic, as if that's somehow a lesser topic than writing about public life. I've always found domesticity the most important topic to write about. At the same time, the problem with domesticity is that it's not story shaped. You do the same things, it's a cyclical thing. It's very difficult to write about domesticity in the context of a narrative.

"The point of a crime narrative in particular is you have your domestic set up that's disrupted by some event, and you spend the rest of the novel trying to restore that balance... That's why so many crime protagonists are dysfunctional men with failed marriages, because you want to get the domestic stuff out of the way so you can embark on the adventure."

Not so here. And while it flies in the face of traditional hard-boiled Scottish crime fiction, the richness of this seam makes McIlvanney's writing stand out. So too does his high-flying academic career, which gives him a cushion many writers don't have. All the same, he's only too well aware of how serious a business fiction is.

"Everyone assumes that once you've put a book out, it's a bit like joining the mafia. There's no exit strategy. It's just assumed you'll be a writer for the rest of your life."

Where The Dead Men Go is published by Faber & Faber, £12.99