What
makes a
novel? What secret ingredients are there lurking inside a
writer’s mind that he
or she might share with the outside world? Well, none, actually. Born
with a
wildly overactive imagination and a morbid curiosity it’s not
a huge surprise
that I eventually became a crime writer. But I did not begin my writing
career
as a novelist. For several years I published short stories and was
commissioned
by BBC Radio to write stories for their Schools programmes as well as
selling
articles and occasional poems to national magazines. I even wrote a
short play.
After beginning
my series of novels, I still enjoyed exploring different genres but I
did find
writing a short story became much more difficult. On two occasions what
began
life as a short story has ended up becoming a novel. The first of these
was a
story that I wrote for a crime competition that was part of a weekend
‘Criminal
Event’ in the Black Isle in Scotland.
The guest speaker was PD James, a writer
I’ve long admired and whose presence there was just as much a
lure as entering
the competition itself.
There were other
speakers who made a great impact upon me, however; the Chief Constable
of
Grampian Region, the Procurator Fiscal for that area and a forensic
biologist.
All three showed the internal workings of a real murder case from their
differing perspectives. It was riveting stuff and I left fired up and
determined to be a crime writer. I didn’t win the short story
competition – not
even a commendation came my way: thank goodness! For in later years it
became
the basis for my third novel, Shadows of Sounds
– a book centred on Glasgow’s
classical music scene.
The same thing
happened with Pitch Black. I wrote a short story,
determined to tackle
the genre with more success and, liking what I’d written,
entered it for the
Scottish Association of Writers competition at their weekend school.
Bits of it
were read out by the adjudicator and he was most complimentary about
the
language, etc. I sat, preening myself, delighted to have a mention in
dispatches (and a highly commended place in the competition) but
suddenly this
chap announced, ‘Of course it’s not a short story
at all – this is the first
chapter of a novel.’
Yes, I might have
known all along that this piece of writing had to continue, that I had
to
develop the character and plot and bring Detective Chief Inspector
Lorimer into
the whole affair. And continue it did; with my character becoming a
hunted
suspect in a murder case that centred upon a Scottish football club.
Now this was a
bit of self indulgence on my part since I am a keen football fan. I
don’t have
any great passion for a particular team, excepting our national squad
of
course, but I do follow the fortunes of our local lads in Paisley, St
Mirren
FC, and once I had established the novel’s parameters I
approached their staff
for a bit of background information.
It wasn’t my
first visit behind the scenes at Love
Street as, some years before, I
had been a guest
of one of their greatest saints, goalkeeper and Scottish
Internationalist,
Billy Thompson. But returning to the club with an eye on what I was
about to
create (murder and mayhem at a fictional football club) was really
exciting. As
is my habit, I took a sheet of questions with me and returned with more
answers
and a goodly number of stories to boot. Could I use them? Well,
anything was
possible.
Creating my very
own club was better than fantasy football. On investigating the senior
professional leagues in Scotland,
I discovered that there had never been a
club named after one of our more famous sons, Lord Kelvin. We have a
river and
a famous arena plus various streets named after Kelvin, but not a
football
club. Since Kelvin is based in Glasgow’s
west end that was where I decided to
locate my fantasy club and what should I call its fan base? It came to
me in
one of those rare moments of inspiration: the Kelvin Keelies! For those
who are
unfamiliar with the word, a keelie is the name given to someone born
and bred
in Glasgow
and the term ‘Glasgow Keelie’ has been in
use for centuries. It was so much fun after that to create and name my
club
members from their chairman, Pat Kennedy, right down to the young
apprentice,
Willie Penny. I became absorbed by watching every game I could see on
TV (or
from the stand on a Saturday afternoon) my excuse – if I
needed one – being
that it was all research.
The book is not
totally set against a football stadium, however. My character, who
began her
life in what I thought was going to be a short story, ends up on remand
in
Cornton Vale Women’s Prison and I decided quite early on in
the book that I should
approach the Prison Governor and ask permission to visit.
I’ve been there
several times now as a researcher and have also given classes on
creative
writing to the inmates. It has been an insightful experience for me and
I feel
a wee bit more qualified to write about criminals and crimes than I did
before.
My prison visits have extended to Perth
prison where I gave a talk to a group of
lifers, real murderers who were as interested in me and my work as I
was in
their situation. I often say that reading books and surfing the net is
fine but
that there is no substitute for meeting real people and talking to
them. And
you never know where it might lead!
At present I am
writing the sixth book in the Lorimer series and have already a plan
for number
seven. This always seems to happen to me. I’m well on the way
with one book
when another idea pops into my head. The perennial question of where my
ideas
come from has no easy answer. Possibly my subconscious has gathered
material
when I wasn’t looking, or maybe the real world of crime
impinges on my mind in
the formof
newspaper articles and TV
features to the extent that I am impelled to make something of them.
Whatever
the case may be, I’ve never been short of ideas to date.
Glasgow
is the main backdrop for my books since DCI
Lorimer’s Divisional Headquarters is based slightly to the
west of the city
centre. Unlike Inspector Rebus who works out of St
Leonard’s in Edinburgh,
Lorimer’s HQ is a fictional building,
not based on any particular real-life police station but on all of the
ones I
know best. (Strathclyde Police, especially some of its CID officers,
has been
fantastically helpful over the years and continues to be so.) I see my
home
city as a place of many shifting and overlapping worlds, not as some
see it, a
gritty post industrial sprawl where danger lurks just around the next
dark
alley. Of course I have dark alleys and there must be danger in a crime
novel,
but I do have a missionary’s zeal to show Glasgow
for what it really is; a vibrant and
exciting place full of culture and inspiration. Thus my books have so
far
included the world of art, then clinical psychology, to music,
business, and
now football. (The current ms is set against the background of a
Scottish
secondary school.)
Lorimer himself
is a developing character and the more I write about him the more he
becomes a
real person to me. Lorimer began with a completely different name and I
had to
work pretty hard to make him into the flesh and blood person the reader
meets
in my first book, Never Somewhere Else. It was an
entirely different
experience writing about Dr Solomon Brightman, though. I’d
heard other writers
taking about characters who ‘just came to me like
that!’ and I’d dismissed it
all with a cynical ‘yeah, yeah’. That is, until it
happened to me andSolly
arrived fully formed, sitting (well,
almost) perched on my desk one day, his bushy dark beard and twinkling
eyes
daring me to defy his presence. He even had a name and a background
(Jewish,
London-born academic). Solomon Brightman. Where, I wondered a long time
later,
did that name come from? Once I had tried to analyse it, the answer was
easy:
Solomon the Wise, of course, who was a ‘bright
man’. Funny how the mind works,
isn’t it? And, just for the record, DCI Lorimer was in
existence well before
our local pub was renamed ‘Lorimers’ (chosen by the
clientele after the
celebrated Scottish architect). From the first novel I have involved
Lorimer’s
wife, Maggie, who is an English teacher (one of my previous
professions), and
Dr Rosie Fergusson, a forensic pathologist who is fairly closely based
on the
lovely ladies I’ve met in that profession.
Research into
Rosie’s world drew me to Glasgow City Mortuary. (Yes, I saw a
post mortem; no,
I didn’t faint.) And on a subsequent visit to see my friendly
lady pathologist
I found myself being encouraged to take a University course in forensic
medicine. Rosie’s world became much more real to me through
that year-long
course and gave me fabulous material for many books to come. My
characters do
not exist in isolation from one another; there are developments in each
of
their relationships and readers often ask me what is happening between
Maggie
and Lorimer or Solly and Rosie. I just grin and put my finger to my
lips, for I
may know what is about to happen to them all, but it will take time for
their
activities to reach the bookshelves. Hopefully the awful things I do to
them in
Pitch Black will have my readers turning pages into
the wee small hours
to see if … but like them, I’m afraid you will
have to read it to find
out!
PITCH BLACK is
published by Sphere (3 April 2008) Hbk £19.99
