There are three of us. Born within half a dozen years and a dozen miles of each other in Fife, that idiosyncratic corner of central Scotland. We each grew up with a love of storytelling, lower league Scottish football and whisky. We published our first novels within three years of each other, Iain Banks, Ian Rankin and me. With the best part of 100 novels between us, we provoke journalists to wonder whether there was something in the water.

It reads like the setup for an Iain Banks novel. And if that's what it was, it would be the springboard for a series of intricate interlocking storylines that would draw past and present together in unexpected configurations with explosive consequences. That would be infinitely preferable to the reality of the news that Iain has terminal cancer.

I've known for weeks that this news was coming but that makes it no easier to look at these words on the page. When Iain leaves the stage, the lights will be dimmer, the possibilities less and the prospects more dreary. For he is one of the most playful, inventive and entertaining writers of our generation.

When The Wasp Factory was published in 1984, the critics didn't know what to make of it. They tried to recoil in horror from the grotesquerie of its imagination and the grand guignol of its execution (and executions) but the quality of the writing and the power of its narrative drive grabbed them by the throat and made them read on.

I bought the paperback when it came out in 1985 and can still remember the excitement. I'd never read anything like it and my head swarmed with possibilities. I'd grown up with the Scottish sense of humour, so I had no trouble with the notion that something so dark, so disturbing and so bleak could also be laugh-out-loud funny. I'd just never seen it written down before.

That brio, that joie de vivre, has characterised all his work. Even in the darkest corners, there is always a shred of optimism, a reminder not to take ourselves too seriously. He's a storyteller whose faith in humans can embrace the worst of what we are capable of and still refuse to lie down and die.

And what stories. The brilliant experimentation of The Bridge. The high comedy and heart-rending grief of The Crow Road. The dark disreputable page-turning thrills of Complicity. The sheer humanity of Stonemouth. And let's not forget the profligacy of imagination that underpins his science fiction.

I hadn't read speculative fiction since my teens. I thought it was only geeky boys with no lives who read that stuff. But I bought Consider Phlebas because of the name on the spine. And the Culture novels became another can't-miss figure in the landscape of my reading that led me to others – Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson, Octavia Butler.

I've always suspected the habit of a book a year militates against a writer being taken seriously. There's an unspoken bias against those of us whose mind works at that pace, as if somehow we're just playing at it. Wasting our time playing computer games and poker. Eating curries and drinking whisky with our friends. Eagerly seeking the final scores on a Saturday afternoon, regardless of what literary festival time zone we're in.

But we should take Iain Banks's work seriously because it enlightens us as well as lightening the load. I can't help raging against the dying of this light. The only good thing about knowing it's coming is that we can all make bloody sure the man knows how much he means to us all by the time three becomes two.

Val McDermid is the award-winning author of 27 crime novels, including Fever of the Bone, published by Little, Brown