The Scottish writer – who recently confessed she broke down in tears after finishing the seventh and final book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - has been seen “scribbling away” on a detective plot in an Edinburgh café.

Rowling is refusing to reveal the plot of her new tome, but said on her website: “I want to write something completely different. I can take my time. And the idea of just wandering off to a café with a notebook and writing and seeing where it takes me for a while is just bliss.”

She added: “I’ll do what I did with ‘Harry Potter’ – I will write what I really want to write.”

Rowling wrote the boy wizard’s first adventure, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’, in an Edinburgh café when she was a struggling single mother.