Scottish Authors Infiltrate Crimefest

Another year and another Crimefest, and no matter where I turned this year I kept bumping into Scottish authors. They were all over the place. You can’t keep a good Scot down!

So, this year I’m not going to write about all the various panels and what a good time I had. I’m just going to entertain you with a rogues gallery of the writers who weren’t fast enough to escape from me. So, here goes, in surname alphabetical order:

Lucy Cameron

Lucy Cameron. It was great to see Lucy on a panel this year after many years of attendance as a spectator. Lucy has just published her debut novel Night is Watching and I have it on my reading list. I talked to her before she took part in her first panel Nightmares and Trauma and she admitted to shaking in her shoes. But she put up a brilliant performance and I’m sure by her second debut authors’ panel she would have been in her stride.

Mason Cross

Mason Cross. I often meet Mason at CWA (Crime Writer Association) lunches so it’s always a pleasure to see him take part in these events. His Cat and Mouse: Playing with your readers on Friday, was a delight.

Doug Johnstone

Doug Johnstone. Author, journalist, and musician appeared early in the programme on Thursday, talking about the dark side of human nature in the panel What are you hiding?

Michael Malone

Michael Malone. It’s always good to catch up with Michael whom I’ve known for many years and it’s great to observe his success as an author who now has eight books to his name. I read his most recent one A Suitable Lie and it was a cracker, joining the relatively new domestic noir category of crime fiction.

Wullie McIntyre

Wullie McIntyre, who currently writes as W. S. McIntyre. I’d never met Wullie before although I’d brushed shoulders with him on Facebook, and I hadn’t realised he was a criminal defence lawyer. You would expect someone in this career to be somewhat formal but his presentation was humorous and it led me to start reading one of his books Present Tense, and I must say that although it is quite definitely crime fiction, I haven’t stopped laughing since page one.

Caro Ramsay

Caro Ramsay. Another author I’ve known for a long time and count as a friend, floated past me a couple of times with the promise from both of us that we’d meet up. But it didn’t happen, we both seemed to be spiralling in different directions. Next time, I’ll nail her to the floor.

Anne Randall

Anne Randall. I haven’t known Anne quite as long. I’m not sure whether it was last year or the year before we met. But she’s a lovely person and generated enough interest on her author panel, when she spoke about her books and writing, for me to download her first book Riven to my Kindle. I’ve made a mental note to myself that I must read this one ASAP.

Of course, I was also there having a whale of a time and, naturally, I’ve already paid my deposit for next year.

 

Chris Longmuir

Chris Longmuir

https://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk/

Amazon:   Author page

What is Tartan Noir?

(This post was originally published on the Authors Electric site "Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?)

You’ve probably come across references to Tartan Noir on the internet and various other places, and if you walk into a bookstore in Scotland, the chances are you’ll see a display labelled Tartan Noir. But what is Tartan Noir?

The name is an odd mix. The tartan part of the name smacks of tourism, kilts, heather and bagpipes, all the stuff that attracts people to Scotland, although it is not all that relevant in today’s modern world. The second part of the title –Noir – is more reminiscent of blood and gore, and all the horrible things that happen in the darkest of crime fiction. So it is an odd mix indeed.

It was actually James Ellroy who coined the name when he referred to Ian Rankin as the King of Tartan Noir in the 1990s. Since then it seems to have been taken up to describe Scottish crime fiction in general, and has now been given historical antecedents.

The origins of Tartan Noir in Scottish literature are claimed to be rooted in the works of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson and William McIlvaney.

 

James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, written in 1824, seems to be the earliest influence. This novel has been variously described as a psychological case study; a gothic novel with elements of horror; a satire of extreme theology; plus an early example of crime fiction. It is said to be the earliest example of a novel using an alter-ego, and involves a battle between good and evil. It is considered to be an influence on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, as well as James Robertson’s novel, The Testament of Gideon Mack, and various others.

Jekyll and Hyde, written by Stevenson in 1886 uses split personality, and continues the theme of the battle between good and evil. He claims the idea came to him in a nightmare and he called it ‘a fine bogy tale’. In her essay The Dark Threads of Tartan Noir, Carole E. Bannerman writes –

‘Like every noir writer since then, Stevenson situates evil in the heart of man, and then places that man in the heart of a city. The city becomes a manifestation of the moral hypocrisy and the mock respectability that the noir writer attacks.’

Tartan Noir was also heavily influenced by American writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James Ellroy, who were all writing hard-boiled detective fiction, and many Scottish authors followed in their footsteps, probably beginning with William McIlvaney, who has been termed the Godfather of Tartan Noir, a title that bemuses him. When he wrote Laidlaw, he said he had no intention of writing a crime novel. He wanted to write a story that was real, not one where the book was taken up with a murder and whodunit. It just happened that the character he chose was a detective with a troubled past and present.

Many Scots have a fascination for gruesome events, particularly those that have happened in the past, therefore it is not surprising that Burke and Hare, the body snatchers who operated in Edinburgh between 1827-1828, and Deacon Brodie, a respectable town councillor by day and a housebreaker at night, are considered influential in the rise of the type of dark writing labelled noir. In fact, Deacon Brodie is considered to be one of the influences behind the writing of Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde.

So where does that take us in defining Tartan Noir? Is it the broad sweep of Scottish crime fiction, or is it a subset of hard-boiled and dark crime, that takes the reader to a dark and scary place?

Maybe if we look at the issues Tartan Noir novels explore, that will help us decide. These include psychological and socio-economic issues, hard-boiled crime, and dark crime. The characters are invariably flawed, often with split personalities and they are anti-heroes rather than heroes. So does this rule out cosy crime? And how dark does dark crime have to be? Or is it safer to include all Scottish crime? I don’t know. Do you have an opinion?

Oh, and before I go, would anyone like to comment whether I fit into the Tartan Noir category with my Dundee crime series of books? I’d love to know.

http://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk/

Amazon Author Page

Amazon UK

Amazon.com

What’s in a Name?

 

How important is the name you give your characters? And how much thinking goes into names that do not confuse the reader?

 
Why am I asking this? Well, over the past few weeks I’ve lacked a certain mobility which means I’ve had time to read over my work in progress from the beginning and do a bit of editing. That was when it struck me! I’ve given my new detective inspector the name, Kate Rawlings. So what’s the matter with that? Well, one of my other characters is Detective Sergeant Sue Rogers and, although she is not the main character, she often pairs up Detective Sergeant Bill Murphy, who is my main character.
 
So, Rawlings and Rogers, the names are too similar to avoid confusion in a reader’s mind. What to do? What to do?
 
Well, I can’t rename DS Sue Rogers, because she’s featured in both Night Watcher, and Dead Wood. So that leaves me no choice but to rename DI Kate Rawlings. And she’s not the easiest person to deal with.

 

No problems, I hear you say, just get on with it and rename her. However, it’s not as simple as that, because characters get attached to their names, and there’s going to be a pretty big tantrum when I break it to Kate, that her name needs to be changed.
 

Characters, you see, often make their own decisions about names. When I was writing Dead Wood, my detective constable was called Joanne. Now I like Joanne as a name, Jo for short, but Joanne apparently didn’t take to the name at all, and I found that halfway through the book she’d miraculously turned into Louise. It was decision time. Would I do a find and replace on Louise to turn her back into Joanne, or should I do the reverse. After much thinking I came to the decision that if Joanne wanted to be called Louise, then Louise it should be.
 
So I’m now back to decision time and building up the courage to tell Kate she can’t be called Rawlings. But then there’s the other problem! What the heck should I call her instead, and will she make the decision for me, or is it back to the Name Dictionaries to find a suitable one? Oh, and what if she doesn’t like the new name I choose? Decisions! Decisions!
 

How do you name your characters? And are your characters as bolshie as mine? I’d love to know.

 



 
http://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk/

Amazon Author Page

 

Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?

In case you’re wondering, the answer is no, I’m not clever enough to think up a title like the one above. It’s a lovely name for a blog though, and the reason I’m using it is to let you know that this is where my blog post will be today. Here’s the link you will want to click to see it http://authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk/
 
My blog post has the title What is Tartan Noir? And I’m sure you’ll want to read it to find out.
 
A bit about Do Authors Dream of Electric Books. This is a fascinating blog well worth following. There are approximately thirty contributors and a new post goes online every day. My day for posting is the 19^th day each month, so if you pop onto the site today you’ll catch my post. However, if you go there after the 19^th you can still scroll down the page to find me. Oh, and you never know what other fascinating titbits might come up in the process.
 
So, I look forward to seeing you while I dream of electric books, and maybe you’ll join in my dream by leaving me a comment.
 
http://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk/