The face is softer than the photographs lead you to anticipate. Until Hugh Collins moves his head slightly into profile, and the deep gouge of the cleaver scar appears, like a crude attempt to draw him a new jawline. Plastic surgery was once offered. He rejected it as a too easy denial of his identity. ''I'm walking around with a big label on my head,'' he says. ''It says 'Murderer'.''

This might be mistaken for evil bravado, but there is no glint in his eye. He is being factual. Open like a wound, Collins does not indulge illusions about himself. Born Catholic, a former altar boy who was once intended for the priesthood, he might be wearing the brand of his sin. Yet it is concealed in the jacket cover image of his book, which discreetly tilts the head the other way. It is the title that carries the label this time: Autobiography Of A Murderer.

''It's a brutal title,'' he agrees. ''But it's a book about violence and it's about a murder. I've got to acknowledge that. There isn't any way round that. I just decided to get straight to the point.''

Again rejected as cosmetics were the other titles that had been put forward. ''Life After Life'' suggested a redemption the book deliberately avoids. Variations on A Sense Of Freedom just antagonised his ambivalent feelings towards Jimmy Boyle, his resentment about being constantly portrayed as under his former prison mentor's shadow. He acknowledges Boyle as a charismatic influence in the Barlinnie Special Unit, but he didn't like Boyle's book. He thinks it made an excuse of a deprived background. For that matter, Boyle didn't like Collins's book in its earliest drafts. He thought its jumping chronology was difficult to follow.

It was a book that Collins says he didn't particularly want to write. Boyle had first encouraged him to get his aggro out on paper. This produced thousands of pages of ''neurosis on paper'', as Collins dismisses the Barlinnie diaries he hammered out daily on a typewriter.

There were also 40 pages of manuscript, which Bill Buford published in a Crime edition of Granta magazine after the author's release in 1993. Buford pressed him to expand it into a book. Collins, after first suggesting a ghost writer, toiled to produce the 200 pages of the current book. He hates writing. He loves what it gets out of his system.

Buford kept promising to get the thing read. Collins sent him a plastic bullet. He advised the next one would be metal and it would be travelling at 100mph towards Buford's head. ''I've got a good relationship with him,'' explains Collins, agreeably. The upshot was Buford liked it, but moved on to edit New Yorker. The book didn't happen. Macmillan picked it up. Collins dismisses reports of a six-figure advance as ''crap''. The tabloids called it ''blood money''.

''Put it this way, what they paid was no incentive to turn your back on crime,'' says the former gangland enforcer who found his own reasons to go straight. ''I could have a hundred grand tomorrow if I went back to crime. I'm up to here in debt.''

He lives in a rented flat in the centre of Edinburgh. Its one studio room commands awesome views of Princes Street below, over the Forth to Fife and up the estuary to the two bridges. His social relationship with Edinburgh is at a similar remove. Cautiously, nervously, he watches his public self at a distance.

The past three years are the longest period he has known outside of institutions since he was 16. He still talks about ''out here'', as though a large part of Hugh Collins remains in confinement. He admits ''nostalgia'' for the bonding of prison life, but is scathing of the system. He shares his life with the sculptress Caroline McNairn. They married after his release.

Collins is more concerned about gaining recognition for his own sculptures than for his book. ''I don't know if I could write anything,'' he mutters paradoxically, then admits he has started on a second. Working title: Passing Strangers. It will fill in the gaps of a former life that was lost.

His reticence over his literary potential is not shared. James Kelman admires the formal concern of Collins's writing, which is like a collision of snapshots, avoiding facile climaxes. It probes. It questions concepts of time and fear, machismo, and violence. ''What I'm describing here is the ugliness of gratuitous violence,'' he writes at the end of one chapter. ''Is there any other kind?''

''It's very easy to use a place like the special unit and become a celebrity,'' he concedes. ''But I honestly believe there are lessons to be learned out of this book if people are interested enough to read it. I make no apologies.

''There are a number of reasons for having done the thing. The main one is this book will allow me to move on, after acknowledging a very nasty past. I'm ashamed of it. But I won't try and grab a new identity to deny all that. If I've got to live in Edinburgh, or anywhere in Scotland, I want to be able to get on with my life. Anyone getting the tabloid image of me as a bloody psycopath for the last 20 years - if they want to know what I did, it's all here printed in black and white.''

And the murder? It is given six pages in the middle of the book, a structural aspect that disappointed one publisher looking for a more gripping treatment, and at least one other expecting a more confessional, redemptive approach. Collins writes that he didn't like William Mooney, the man he murdered. They argued. They got tooled up. One died. One lived to write about the culture of violence that produced their confrontation in a Glasgow pub.

Of William Mooney the book's acknowledgements admit: ''I would rather he were alive today than the existence of this book.'' In the absence of empty apologies, this comes over as sincere.

Collins says there is no use in his pretending he can fully appreciate the personal grief of James Mooney, the son of the dead man. He adds: ''James Mooney, who is now 26, has been saying he wants to know what happened that night. His dad was a thug. I was a thug. And both of our families have suffered.

''I would be quite willing to sit down with him, but I don't know what purpose it would serve. I would do it if it would help him.''

n Hugh Collins. Autobiography Of A Murderer. Macmillan, #15.99.