THE START OF IT ALL

How did all this start? Why write crime novels? I’ve always written – revue sketches, songs, radio plays, short stories – but novels are big, they call for an extended commitment to a project and I thought I was more of a sprinter than a long distance writer. (I’m also lazy.) Then there was this competition for a comic novel. I started to have a go at it and, after a few weeks, realised I’d managed to produce a fairly thick stack of printed pages, so I carried on and finished it. And I realised that that’s how we achieve any major undertaking – we don’t ‘write a novel’, we write a few words, then a few more, and gradually, they accumulate and become the thing itself. There’s an underlying purpose, of course, and the ‘idea’ of the end-product, but the process – like any other – is a step at a time.

An agent liked the novel and took me on, so I wrote another one – a stand-alone thriller. Then, seeing the advantages of the traditional police procedural and the freedoms a writer has within the form, I felt that the next logical step was to turn to crime. And so I wrote Material Evidence. I thought I knew the basic things I’d need – detectives, a body or two, forensic stuff, a bit of sex and violence (tasteful, of course), plot, and that would more or less be that. (Academics and people who take life too seriously will – justifiably – deride me for such a simplistic summary. I know you need structure, theme, a moral stance and no doubt many other fancy semiological, post-modern, pre-nuptial, antithetical and metasynchronic analyses interspersed with contrapuntal socio-political exegeses or at least men with trilby hats, but I’m not giving a lecture on the nature of the narrative experience, I’m just saying how I came to write crime fiction.)

Detectives

Grampian police were very helpful. I sat with a couple of their top CID men and asked daft questions. I learned (something I already knew) that the usual fictional combination of inspector and sergeant is not just rare, it’s non-existent. Usually, there’s a superintendent in charge with at least one inspector as sidekick, and a huge team of sergeants and constables carefully briefed on a twice daily basis. Their work’s a painstaking, systematic accumulation of relevant information. But I was writing a novel not a police manual. So I learned a lot from my visits to the Queen Street headquarters in Aberdeen and tried to stay as close to actual procedures as possible. But I knew that readers would prefer the traditional pairing, so enter Jack Carston and Jim Ross.

Bodies and forensic stuff

The bodies and forensic stuff were easier. There are reference books on forensic psychiatry, forensic archaeology, forensic everything. The ones on forensic medicine are books you shouldn’t read if anyone can look over your shoulder. They’re full of stomach-churning cases and gruesome illustrations. Many of the real cases are too extreme to be used in fiction, not because of any squeamishness but because the reader just wouldn’t believe them – such as the guy who tried to commit suicide by taking a Black and Decker and drilling lots of different holes in his head. In fact, I based the death in my first book on a real life case but had to change some significant details because my editor said the perpetrator would need a degree in physics or engineering to work out the mechanics of the killing. So I got a few facts about the constitution of man-made fibres, the effect of shot gun cartridges fired into the chest cavity from various distances, the reactions that take place in the body’s tissues post mortem and I was all set.

Sex and violence

OK, I put this in as a gag but there’s a serious point to it, which needs more space than we’ve got here. Many readers of crime fiction expect to find gore, extremes of depravity and sexual excess, especially in its more violent forms. It’s part of the tradition. I write such scenes but I haven’t really resolved for myself what appetite I’m satisfying (in me or the reader) in doing so. There’s a morbid fascination in horror. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t rubber-neck as they drive past accidents. When there’s a particularly vicious rape or murder, the daily reports reiterate the grossest details time and again. It all suggests that there’s a fundamental fascination with the forbidden, a delicious shiver that comforts us because we can access this unknown area from the safety of our conventional lives. I have no idea how to explain it but I am aware that describing (indeed, inventing) such scenes carries a responsibility. In my second book, Rough Justice, there’s a nasty rape. One (female) reviewer picked up on this but, thankfully, noted that it’s not gratuitous but essential to the resolution of the plot. It is, but it was still uncomfortable to write.

Plot and setting

There are reasons behind every action and consequences which arise from it. So, if you’ve got a body and a set of characters who relate to one another, you’ve got a plot. Because once you start looking for motives, you uncover all sorts of possibilities and secrets. They may not coincide with one another but in amongst them there’s a logic – however twisted – that leads inevitably to the crime and its aftermath.

You’d think that choosing the setting would be straightforward. Wrong. The options are a specific identifiable location or a generalised one which readers can adapt to fit their own vision. I chose the north east of Scotland. I’ve lived in Aberdeen for most of my life and I love the whole area. But I didn’t want to use the city itself because I might decide to introduce a few corrupt or incompetent cops and, as well as not wanting to slag off people who’d been very helpful, I didn’t want to collect more than my share of parking tickets. So that meant inventing the West Grampian force, which, needless to say, only exists between the covers of my books. As does the town they live in, Cairnburgh. It’s amazing how difficult it is to invent a name that doesn’t sound artificial. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.

Spikkin right

No, not a typo. I did mean to say ‘spikkin’. It illustrates one last issue – the way the characters speak (or, in Aberdeen, spik). Our accents are part of who we are. The wonderful Public Service films and broadcasts of the 30s and 40s featured working and middle class families who were reduced to eating cheap stuff such as bread and dripping because they’d obviously blown a large wedge of their income on elocution lessons. Not any more. Most of my characters have neutral accents, but I wanted some of them to belong distinctly to the region and so they had to speak in the local dialect. And that was a problem. Expressions such as ‘Foo ye deein?’ (How are you?) or ‘Fa ye spikkin till?’ (Who are you speaking to?) aren’t often heard around the water coolers of London or New York. So I toned them down and dodged the more extreme forms. But even that wasn’t enough. Understandably, readers prefer instant comprehensibility to linguistic colour and so I had to make more compromises and use non-specific ‘Scottish’ forms like ‘werenae’ and ‘Aye’. (Which gave a particular piquancy to one reviewer’s remark that ‘some of the Scots dialogue is a little suspect and inconsistent’.) So the upshot is that, in my head anyway, some of the Cairnburgh locals now sound like Australian or Irish extras from Braveheart.