Throughout his appearances, Lazlo Woodbine has never been specifically described barring his traditional attire of a trenchcoat and fedora, with all his stories being narrated in the first person.
However, in any of Rankin's novel where he plays a long-term role, Lazlo commonly finds his way around his four-set rule to move from location to location, such as closing his eyes while travelling from the alley to the rooftop – thus avoiding actually seeing anything, and hence not breaking the rule – or assuming another persona altogether to account for the travel time.
The only occasion where Woodbine has clearly violated his four-set-rule was in Armageddon III, when he briefly shared a bedroom with Rex Mundi and a two-headed baby that had been abducted and experimented on by aliens.
According to Woodbine, when reading one of his novels the reader can always expect a lot of gratuitous sex and violence, a trail of corpses, no small degree of name mispronunciation – characters commonly pronounce his name wrong, calling him everything from Woodlouse to Woodstock – and enough trenchcoat humour and ludicrous catchphrases to carry you through a month of rainy Thursdays.
Only in The Suburban Book of the Dead (Armageddon III: The Remake) has Lazlo Woodbine explicitly appeared as a real person, and even then he came from an alternate future and travelled back into the past to investigate a case (aided by Barry the Time Sprout).