Natural Casues
Both The Book of Souls and Natural Causes feature as their lead character Detective Inspector Anthony McLean. Natural Causes centres around the discovery of a young woman’s body, walled up in the basement of an abandoned Edinburgh mansion house. She has been brutally murdered in a bizarre ritual, then hidden away for at least sixty years. Her discovery coincides with a series of murders of high-profile members of Edinburgh society. Whilst each of these murders appears to be solved quickly, McLean is convinced they are all linked, and to the cold case he is investigating.
In The Book of Souls, McLean’s troubled past comes back to haunt him, when a serial killer he put away over a decade earlier dies in prison. Almost before his body is in the ground, a woman’s corpse turns up bearing all-too-familiar hallmarks. McLean is put under almost intolerable stress, as not only are the press suggesting he put the wrong man behind bars all those years ago, the final victim of the original serial killer was McLean’s fiancée.
You not only write crime but also fantasy series called The Ballad of Sir Benfro, so do you a have a preference between the two genres?
I’ve written Science Fiction, comics, a thriller and a travel book as well, so I’m something of a genre gadfly. There are elements of fantasy in my crime fiction, too. I can never quite completely give up on that genre.
I decided to try my hand at crime fiction after my friend Stuart MacBride had his big break with Cold Granite - the first in his series featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae. Stuart, like me, started writing fantasy and SF, but switched to crime fiction on the advice of his agent. It worked for him, so I thought I’d give it a go.
You run a farm in North East Fife, so how do you fit your writing around this?
My most productive writing time tends to be the evening hours, between eight and two in the morning (although I can’t often stay up that late - midnight’s bedtime these days). Generally speaking I’ll do the farm work during daylight hours, then write in the evenings. Alas, this leaves all too little time for reading - I tend to get a half hour in before turning the light out last thing at night, which means that now when I read during the day I instantly feel sleepy!
The most disruptive thing I’ve found is doing the publicity for the books. I love meeting readers, and there’s a thrill to signing copies for people. It amazes me that people are interested enough to interview me, and I do my best to be interesting for them in return. But all of these activities tend to take place in the day, and away from the farm, which means I have to get someone in to keep an eye on things whilst I’m gone. I have suggested to Penguin that they might like to time the publication of the third McLean book so that it doesn’t clash with lambing!
Tell us what inspired the character of Inspector McLean.
Tony McLean first appeared in a comic script I wrote on spec for 2000AD comic back in the early nineties. He was just a support character then, and was called John. I changed him to Tony when I realised the Bruce Willis character in the Die Hard movies was John McClane. He was a detective on the team investigating a series of bizarre and unlinked crimes in Edinburgh, and for some undisclosed reason was able to see the ghost who was the central character of the story when no-one else could. I used him again in a short-lived comic strip, As If By Magic, that I wrote and Stuart MacBride drew.
I’m quite lazy, really, so when I started writing a novel (the never-to-be-published Jacob) based around the second coming of Christ at the turn of the millennium, I revived Tony McLean as a support character. He had a walk-on part in Head, another novel which will likely remain unpublished. With each outing, he fleshed out a little, and when I decided to try writing crime fiction, it seemed only logical to promote him to lead character. I wrote a half dozen short stories to try and work out who he was. One of them was Natural Causes, which I later extended into a full novel.
How much research goes into your crime books?
A lot less than you might think. I tend to write the first draft, then fill in the obvious blanks later. I’m writing books based around the police, so some amount of procedural accuracy is necessary, but I’m not slavish to detail. I work on the principle that if I’m obsessing about some small fact it’s time to come at the story from a different angle. People aren’t reading my books to find out how the police go about their business; they’re reading them (hopefully) because they enjoy the interplay of the characters and the gradual revelation of the plot.
Also, did I mention I was lazy? I’m not the sort of person who finds it easy to approach others for help, so the thought of phoning up the police and asking them stuff fills me with a deep sense of terror.
When Natural Causes first came out, I had an email from an ex-Lothian and Borders Police Detective Inspector. He liked the book, made no mention of procedural inaccuracies, but wanted to know who my inside source was and who I’d based the character of Detective Chief Inspector Duguid upon. I guess I must have done something right.
You are a self-published author, so tell us about this process.
Self-publishing, particularly with e-books, is incredibly easy now. This is both a good thing and a bad - anyone with a modicum of computer experience can do it, which means that hundreds of thousands of people have. Unfortunately this also means there is a sea of rubbish out there, making it hard to find the gems.
I’m reasonably tech-savvy, having spent some years developing websites, so rolling up my sleeves and coding e-books was not difficult. I’m no artist though, so I commissioned covers for the books from a professional. These were not as expensive as you might think, and were definitely money well spent.
I got the idea for my basic marketing strategy from Australian author Simon Haynes. He has made the first book in his Hal Spacejock SF series free as a taster, with the idea being that people will pay for the later books in the series. Since I had two books of a series ready to go, both of which had already done the rounds of the publishing houses with no success, I thought I’d try the same. I set a target of shifting 1000 copies of both books combined in the first year. This turned out to be on the conservative side. By the time I sold the rights eight months after first publication of Natural Causes, I’d had almost 350,000 copies of both books downloaded - free and paid for - in the US and UK.
You were shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger award in 2008 and 2009, so how did this make you feel?
Elated, and not a little terrified. It was fabulous to get recognition, though frustrating that in the end nothing came of it.
Who are your favourite fantasy and crime reads?
Like many, my first taste of fantasy was probably from reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, although The Box of Delights was something I read as a child that has stayed with me ever since. More recent fantasy favourites include Katherine Kerr, Robin Hobb (as herself and as Megan Lindholm), Tad Williams and Stephen Donaldson - although the Thomas Covenant books are hard going sometimes. I’ve very much enjoyed Joe Abercrombie’s books in the last few years, too. I’ve read the first of the Game of Thrones books, and enjoyed it a lot, but looking at the sheer volume of words in the rest of the series, I despair of ever having the time to finish it.
For crime fiction, I’d have to say Stuart MacBride is a big influence and his books are always hugely enjoyable. I loved all of RD Wingfield’s Frost books, recommended to me by Stuart, and Denise Mina is always worth reading. Chris Brookmyre skirts around the borders of crime writing, but does it so brilliantly I’ll include him here too. And from the other side of the tracks, so to speak, Allan Guthrie is a writer who deserves much greater recognition than he has. As with the fantasy, my biggest problem is finding time to read at all. I think it’s very important to make as much time as possible though - you can’t be a writer unless you’re also a reader.
Tell us about the inspiration behind both stories in the Inspector McLean series.
Natural Causes began life as a short story, published by Spinetingler magazine in 2006. I like the conflict that comes when you throw a little of the irrational into an otherwise rational world - how would a police officer deal with the possibility that there might actually be occult forces at work in the crime he is investigating? Going back to that original comic script, McLean was the only policeman who could see the ghost - his curse if you like. In the books he is resistant to this, as any sane man would be, but he is also trained to sift evidence and come to a conclusion. There is an exquisite conflict as soon as you throw something unnatural into the mix.
I’m not sure where the central idea for Natural Causes came from - I wrote the initial short story such a long time ago it’s been buried under a tonne of other stuff. The core of The Book of Souls goes back to a comic script I started writing but abandoned in the early nineties, about an ancient book that reads you, rather than the other way around. The heroine of that tale is trapped in the book as it reads her, and she has to find her way out through various chapters, each one the soul of someone who has failed to escape.
The idea of McLean’s fiancée being the final victim of the serial killer popped into my head as I was writing Natural Causes - one of those Eureka! moments more experienced writers know to be wary of. It wasn’t until I re-read Stuart MacBride’s excellent near-future thriller Halfhead that I realised a very similar fate befalls the wife of his protagonist, Will Hunter. My subconscious had latched onto the idea without bothering to acknowledge where it had come from.
What is next for you?
I’m putting the finishing touches to the third McLean book, The Hangman’s Song, at the moment, and also writing the fourth in the Ballad of Sir Benfro series, which may or may not be the last one. Beyond that, there are plenty more McLean stories to tell. I have a couple of other writing projects I’d like to do, but it very much depends on finding the time. As well as running the farm, I am about to start building a house, which I’m told can be somewhat stressful.