Joel's novels are set mainly in Birmingham, Britain's second city, which is seen by many as a national joke. Where London is seen as hip and chic, and Manchester and the northern cities are cool and toughly independent, Brum is seen as being a bit limp, neither a commercial nor cultural centre. So, would Joel's novels be different if they had been set in a different city? "Perhaps not very - there's some similar landscape and architecture in Manchester, for example. The novels are coloured by their setting rather than being preoccupied with it. And while the industrial hinterland of Birmingham is important as a setting in the first novel, comparable regions exist in several places - in Shropshire or in Wales, for instance. How the different city life, musical traditions, idiom and behaviour would come across if I were setting the books elsewhere is an interesting question - I hope they would come across."

He admires "Birmingham's multi-ethnic community and the sardonic, level-headed attitude of its people. I dislike its money obsession, its mediocrity, its Philistinism, its middlebrow normality and its lack of imagination. That ambivalence runs through my writing. So does the preoccupation with districts, the sense of there not being a centre, that comes from living in a conurbation. Birmingham grew from an assembly of villages. You can't tell where it stops and the Black Country begins. It's a mixed buffet of a city, with diversity built into it - I like that, and find it resonates with my personality and worldview in a way that much of the city's culture doesn't."

Birmingham "is a generic late capitalist shopping centre - for average clothes, packaged food, mass-market entertainment and hasty sex," yet while this isn't the Birmingham in Joel's novels, neither does he "really write about the city's underbelly - the world of criminals, drug addicts, prostitutes or beggars, for example, is not the world I try to represent. What I'm describing is the slightly marginal, dream-tinged world of musicians, political activists, drunks and sexual adventurers. It's not the cutting edge, just a kind of active otherness. If readers don't recognise the features of the city that I emphasise or the people I describe, fair enough. I probably wouldn't want to live in their version of the city either." And there, I think, is why I'm so fond of Joel's work and why I've made it my mission in life to encourage everyone (even at gunpoint, if necessary) to read his novels - because his Birmingham is one that I recognise. And not only because one of the characters has my old job in the same library I used to work in.

Sadly, some of the locals aren't too fond of Joe's work: "The local press hated The Blue Mask with a passion." Andrew Cowan in The Birmingham Post (8th February 2003) said, "You'll need a strong stomach and an open mind not to be offended by some of this novel's content... Lane often sinks to the level of pure seediness, apparently wading through the grotesque in an attempt to shock" and that "his city is an anachronism and like the music of the Cure and the Smiths which soundtrack his prose, unrecognisable to most of us who live here." Speak for yourself, Mr Cowan! But then someone called Richard Williamson, writing for The Sunday Mercury, had already weighed in on 26th January 2003, declaring that he didn't recognise the city, or the philosophical and musical references, which, rather than rubbishing Joel's novel, in fact demonstrates Mr Williamson's own ignorance and... dare I say it... bigotry. Because of the scenes of gay sex in the novel, the reviewer finds himself saying the cringesome cliched line, "I do not mind what other people get up to in private as long as it harms no-one." Oh! And probably some of his best friends are black? But Joel's physical descriptions are not unusual in contemporary British fiction - take one look at anything by Will Self or Billy Childish, for instance - and Joel says, "I think it's interesting and useful to write in that way. I was following the influence of Jean Genet, James Baldwin, Dennis Cooper and others." And as for the critics? "British critics are often hidebound and unimaginative in that regard. They cling to a mind-body dualism that labels sensuality as 'physical' and therefore crass. I do think physicality is important for authenticity, but I also think it's psychologically and aesthetically revealing. I shouldn't have to justify using language or imagery that was widespread in modern literature before I was born. Also, I think at least one of the critics you mention confused representation with promotion: he thought I was trying to sell as a 'lifestyle' the behaviour of a character who was going out of his mind. You can't argue with stupidity like that." Well, quite....

Another aspect of Joel's work which shares similarities with other contemporary authors is the sense of living in a city yet not feeling part of it. They are on the cusp - Michael Bracewell's wanderers, for example, the detached London office worker of Present Tense, and Gwendoline Riley's novels, Cold Water and Sick Notes. In fact, Gwendoline could be seen as a female, Manchester-based version of Joel Lane. They share the aesthetics of lonely night-time cities, with marginalised characters: Gwendoline's borderline alcoholic barmaid in Cold Water and purposeless, drifting provincial flaneuese in Sick Notes; and Joels' tortured musicians and disillusioned revolutionaries. Joel says that Cold Water is "a melancholy, brittle, tender angel of a book, perfectly expressed and unusually restrained." So do you have to live in a provincial city to feel this way? "I do think that kind of sensibility relies on the tension between urban and small-town sensibilities - so Riley's barmaid, for example, lives in Manchester but makes a crucial journey to Macclesfield. It's that sous les paves, la plage feeling: you live in the city for the opportunities it brings, but it never quite becomes your reality. There are lots of people in London with the same kind of sensibility - for example, Patrick Fitzgerald of Kitchens of Distinction was from Tooting. The fact that the major English cities have established immigrant communities - Irish, Afro-Carribean, Asian, Jewish, whatever - adds to the sense of their being magnets for outsiders. Of course, the London of someone like that is very different from the London of Docklands or the Evening Standard. And the Birmingham of someone like that is not the Birmingham of Brindleyplace or the Sports Argus. Some of the best London fiction has been written by people who've adopted London as their home but don't quite feel part of it - for example, Nicholas Royle and M. John Harrison.

Music is obviously a big influence on Joel Lane - the dark, haunted alleyways and paranoid nocturnal landscapes of his novels remind me of the lyrics of indie bands such as Marion (who he mentions in both his novels) and even Dog Man Star-era Suede. The emphasis on violence in The Blue Mask, and the protagonist being from Macclesfield kept reminding me of Marion's single 'Violent Men' - and to return to the Gwendoline Riley comparisons again, a band in Cold Water, from Macclesfield, also remind me of Marion (and Marion, in case you were wondering, were a mid-90s indie band, who supported one of Morrissey's tours and had an album produced by Johnny Marr. Their guitarist is now in New Order). Speaking of whom... "I liked The Smiths a lot at one time, but have become more than a little bored since with Morrissey's selfish posturing. There was a humility to Morrissey's early songwriting that I don't find in his later work. He's too much of a queen for me to find his emotions convincing: I feel I'm drowning in cheap glitter." Therefore, having read Joel's novels, it's no surprise that he says of The Smiths that they "worked best unseen: a lonely voice and a chiming guitar echoing from the corner of the room on an icy morning in some forgotten town. My favourite Morrissey line is A piano plays in an empty room."

Common to both Joel's novels, other than the noir-ish presentation of Birmingham, are his gay or bisexual male protagonists. Now, it's hardly the case that this bars anyone who isn't from reading and understanding his work (unless you review books in local newspapers), but it's certainly a central concern in his writing. In From Blue To Black, the indie band are to be interviewed in a gay men's magazine, but the writers at the magazine don't think the band's music is 'gay' enough - Joel challenges the stereotype that all gay men like either handbag dance music or diva musical numbers. "Yes, I was having fun with the musical snobbery and narrowness of camp taste, and echoing comments made by Bob Mould in a number of interviews - for example, that the rock world was more able to accept his sexuality than the gay world was able to accept his music. We all know that these cultural barriers are the result of fear and ignorance rather than some fundamental 'gay sensibility', yet people continue to talk about 'gay culture' as if it were something monolithic and coherent, a kind of aesthetic hard-on. I feel strongly that homosexually inclined welders and bricklayers contribute as much to 'gay culture' as people who design stage sets for musicals. As for the gay scene, it's less and less a camp/macho faƧade these days, more and more a neutral forum where people meet, chat, drink, dance etc with no fashion, aesthetic, conversational or behavioural agenda other than meeting friends or same-sex partners. I think the gay scene mostly presents itself in an honest way - otherwise, it would alienate too many of its customers. I outgrew the life of bars, clubs and casual pick-ups some years ago, but I neither dislike it nor feel disillusioned by it. It's just not what I need any more." Although Birmingham's 'village' is in the city centre and so perhaps mainstream, most of the clubs and bars are situated around former factory sites - making it a place at once within and beyond the limits of run-of-the-mill society. So does this edgy positioning contribute to Joel's dark urban aesthetic, where the city grants certain behavioural liberties, yet at the same time is paranoid and dangerous? "I think a lot of those people who go there are quite aware of that aspect of the district. Most of what is boring, narrow and petty about the gay scene is, of course, fully characteristic of straight bars and clubs - in fact, the latter are generally worse." And gay clubs aren't as likely to smell of knock-off Lynx deodorant.

So what about the contemporary fiction 'scene' in Britain, with all its ladlit and chicklit nonsense? Sensibly, Joel "has trouble keeping up with new work" because "I spend too much time reading the American pulp fiction of the thirties and forties: noir and horror fiction... too busy living in a past I never experienced." And so, the various -lits? "The trouble with a popular genre like 'chicklit' or 'ladlit' is that it's a commercial brand rather than a literary movement. There's nothing wrong with the subject matter, but there's a real risk that instead of saying what they want to say, writers will just echo a prevailing style. I'm really tired of what I think of as air-quote writing: writing that simply recycles familiar elements as if to prove that nothing is real. Maybe we need to go outside our own culture to rediscover reality - for example, there aren't many African writers displaying postmodern ennui. And given the critical state of the modern world, the fundamental issues we're all facing in relation to political corruption, global warming, racist wars and the death-grip that the ruling class holds on all popular media, there's something a bit chilling about the insistence that all literature has to be bright and bubbly and entertaining. The world is falling apart while we anatomise our dating habits and our record collections. I'm culpable in that regard, of course."

Could there be 'gaylit'? "I'm sure there could - more and more, gay fiction is turning from the problematic of 'homosexuality' to the more pragmatic and dynamic issues of loyalty, sexual health and how the individual is connected to the wider society. These issues can be taken seriously in the way that Adam Mars-Jones does, or they can be worked up into a soap-opera kind of sentimental froth. And with the advent of gay marriages (no inverted commas, please!) in the UK, no doubt we'll see no end of gay novels about adultery and divorce. That's fine - nobody has to read them who has anything better to do." But don't wait for Joel to write it: "Part of the assimilation of the gay world into society is opening up 'gay culture' to the amiable mediocrity of mainstream taste. I think that's OK. Then people who want their literature, films or whatever to be challenging and serious will have to accept that it's not because of their sexuality: it's because they engage with culture in a different way from that dictated by the commercial media."

Joel makes an uncomfortable, but entirely valid and prophetic point when he says "in ten years' time, it will be more dangerous - in every sense of the word - to be literate and informed than to be homosexual or bisexual."