A Tartan Noir original
I first encountered Bill Knox in a second-hand bookshop in Inverness, twenty-odd years after his death. I was browsing the shelves while hiding from the inevitable Autumn Highland rain, idly looking for nothing in particular. Randomly, I pulled out a battered old hardback and read the title: Death Department. Intrigued, I flicked through a few...
A sitting duck
The plan… It had first taken shape in Renfield’s mind one morning over a month before when the 29-year-old reporter, on the staff of the Evening View, had been having a casual 10a.m. cup of tea in the canteen at Glasgow police headquarters. The big room, reserved for sergeants and constables, with pressmen having an...
Anatomy of an obsession
You’re likely wondering what all this is about – my aim in contacting you. It’s been three years since rain flicked our glasses as we stood inches apart and I stared at your quivering upper lip, which always reminded me of the tilde: ~. Last week, a journalist contacted me. Since I appeared in a...
A time for reading
It is the middle of the afternoon on a Sunday in March. She has just woken up from a nap. The snow is no longer falling but its brightness is still being projected onto the ceiling of their apartment. It is rather lovely. The cat is watching her from a pouffe opposite the sofa with...
Island stories and other fictions
When Rishi Sunak recently tried shamelessly to turn the Rochdale byelection into a national crisis, warning about extremism tearing us apart, one phrase leapt out at me. Immigrants who integrate, he said, “have helped write the latest chapter of our island story.” Unless my publishers had really upped their game, I knew he wasn’t referring...
Tell me a story
Our oldest memories are in stories. Our oldest memories are stories. To tell a story well is a skill: the sort that can be learned but cannot easily be taught. To be told a story is a pleasure and often a privilege. When I first picked at the thread of an idea for my debut...
Elsa Drucaroff, Rodolfo Walsh and Argentina
The years of the military Junta cast a very long shadow in Argentina, and it’s thoroughly poignant that Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case appears in English just as the country has taken a swerve in a desperate new direction. I had never heard of Rodolfo Walsh. That was put right by Slava Faybysh when he brought...
A kind of truce
It’s the middle of the night on a residential street. Rodolfo Walsh leaves his house and heads to a nearby bar located at the last stop of one of the city bus lines. At this hour, it’s full of regulars: cabbies and bus drivers. Since the payphone is all the way in back – right...
Kate Brody: Missing people, muddled lives
Kate Brody’s pacy debut thriller is a novel of our times. A missing woman, social media conspiracy theories, mental health issues, suspicion, trust, self-harm and family trauma are woven together to give us a troubling, riveting and sharply written noir set on America’s East Coast. What’s the worst that can happen when you’ve already lost...
Barmaids and landladies in fiction
My new psychological thriller What We Did in the Storm is set on the beautiful Isles of Scilly, pitching dark secrets and even darker deeds against stunning scenery. My lead character happens to be a barmaid working on the island, so I blithely suggested compiling a Top Ten list of fictional barmaids and landladies. Easy,...
The essential art of rewriting
I am always nervous about giving advice to aspiring novelists. My instinct is not to advise at all but to ask them, quite earnestly, if they are sure that this is what they want to do. If the answer is “I think so…” then I am tempted to steer them towards a different course. The...
Locked-room mysteries
Back in the day, a ‘locked-room mystery’ meant exactly that – a murder behind not only closed, but locked doors, ostensibly impossible to commit, and thus a mechanical conundrum to unpick. Think Gaston Leroux’s Le mystère de la chambre jaune (1907), or even Arthur Conan Doyle’s personal favourite of all his Sherlock Holmes stories, ‘The Adventure...
