NEW YORK — Trainspotting <$>author Irvine Welsh's latest book is another tale of vicious characters made worse by alcohol and drugs but the bad boy of Scottish literature says his own wild days are over.It's been more than a decade since he touched heroin, Welsh says, and these days the dread of an impending hangover tends to keep him from indulging too much in other intoxicants.

"You just get to the point where you see the hangover," he told said while sipping green tea at a Manhattan hotel.

"You think, 'Well, I'll have a pull, I'll have a line of coke, I'll have a couple of beers.' Then you think, 'I don't really want to, I'm going to feel crap'."

Dodging a hangover is the theme of his new book, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, published in the United States this month.

It is the story of Danny Skinner, a womanising Edinburgh City Council restaurant inspector in his early 20s with a drinking problem and an irrational hatred of his new colleague, a shy model-railway enthusiast named Brian Kibby.

Somewhat to his own surprise, Skinner manages to impose a curse on Kibby, a teetotaler Star Trek <$>fan who lives with his parents, who then suffers the hangovers and physical injuries incurred by Skinner in drinking bouts, a brawl with soccer hooligans and even a drug-fuelled male rape.

"I always had a fantasy years ago that I'd love to give somebody my hangover," Welsh said, adding that the idea crystallised when he re-read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray<$>, in which the unscrupulous hero remains eternally young while a portrait in his attic grows old and corrupt.

"There's so many writers who write about good and virtuous characters because I think they want the world to perceive them in that kind of way — it's like a James Bond syndrome," Welsh said, adding that he doesn't care how people see him.