Bloody Scotland Photo Gallery

I had a brilliant time at Bloody Scotland so I thought I'd share some pics with you.

A lively event with Christopher Brookmyre and Denise Mina

Happy chappies waiting to go on stage - Mark Billingham and Stuart Macbride

Stuart Macbride successfully turned Mark Billingham, as well as the audience, into zombies as he read from Skeleton Bob

The Digital Detectives - Ed James, Allan Guthrie, and Alexandra Sokoloff

A bit of light relief. The Elvis Cleaning Team sprucing up Stirling on Saturday

Favourite authors Caro Ramsay, and Alex Gray, being interviewed by Gordon Brown

Entertaining Event - Alanna Knight interviewing Peter May

Ian Rankin and Kathy Reichs in conversation

The rapt audience listening to Ian and Kathy Reichs

Peter Mays speaking at the gala dinner where he was awarded with the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award for Entry Island

Lin Anderson with her forensic team - brilliant presentation involving volunteers from the audience

The forensic volunteers suited up and ready to try out their fingerprinting skills

There was lots more but insufficient time to attend everything or post all the pics I took. If you're a crime writer or reader, and within travelling distance of Stirling, this is one event that's unmissable.

Chris Longmuir

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

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Murder Capital of Scotland

Dundee Police Headquarters

Last week’s Dundee Courier and Advertiser, the newspaper for the whole of the Tayside region, displayed a provocative headline – Dundee is Murder Capital of Scotland.

That was some statement. But as the writer of the Dundee Crime Series, it certainly divorces me from comparisons with Midsomer Murders. Not that my books were ever like this because my writing is considerably darker than the popular cosy crime series. However, when a writer chooses a specific town in which to set their murders, the body count is liable to go up.

So, what makes Dundee the murder capital of Scotland. Well, it’s nothing to do with the body count, and it’s all to do with statistics.

Apparently, between 2012 - 2013, there were 62 homicides in Scotland. Now, a prolific crime writer can easily manage to beat that figure in the area they write about. I’m sure Midsomer Murders’ body count is higher than that over the space of one series.

Of those 62 homicides, six occurred in Dundee – great word that ‘occurred’, it really doesn’t do justice to the bloodthirsty nature of the crimes. Six doesn’t seem a lot to warrant giving Dundee the title of ‘murder capital’, but here’s where statistics come into play. It’s all to do with population, you see. The lower the population the higher the percentage.

So, let’s compare it with Glasgow where there were 19 murders over the same period. Surely this should have made Glasgow, Scotland’s murder capital. Glasgow, however, has a far higher population than Dundee, so the 19 murders only equated to 3.19 murders per 100,000 people. Can you have .19 of a murder? And what happened to the other .81? Ah well such things are beyond me. Anyway, to get back to the point. Dundee’s measly six murders equated to 4.05 per 100,000 people. There’s those pesky numbers below the decimal point again. Ah, well, I’m not going to worry about that this time.

Funnily enough, both Edinburgh and Aberdeen only had two murders each. Ian Rankin’s going to be out of a job. But me, as long as I keep setting my books in Dundee, Scotland’s murder capital, I can’t go wrong.

Check out the Dundee Crime series when you have a minute, because there are more murders in my writing territory than there are in Ian Rankin’s.

Chris Longmuir

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

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Highlights of Harrogate Crime Festival

The audience at Harrogate. Were you there?

Special Guest: Ruth Rendell who was interviewed by Jeanette Winterson

Special Guest: William McIlvanney in converstion with Ian Rankin

Forensics: Val McDermid in converstion with Sue Black – it was hilarious

Special Event: Vera – Brenda Blethyn, actress; Elaine Collins, producer of Vera; and Ann Cleeves who writes the Vera books – fantastic

Brenda Blethyn and Ann Cleeves signing books after the event. The queue had to be seen to be believed

Special Guest: Lee Child who was interviewed by the comedienne, Sarah Millican. One of the liveliest reviews I’ve seen Lee do

Special Guest: Kate Atkinson who was interviewed by BBC 4 Front Row’s Mark Lawson

Late Night Quiz: The Scarlet Ladies Team

Late Night Quiz: The winners – the Scarlet Ladies

And so we come to the end of our photo parade of this year’s Harrogate Crime festival. I can’t wait for next year. I’ll see you there if you’re going.

Chris Longmuir

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

http://chrislongmuir.blogspot.co.uk/

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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/

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Do Writers need Writers Groups?

I got to wondering how other writers see writers’ groups. Are they beneficial? Or are they just social gatherings?

 
Well, there are all types of writers’ groups and whether or not you are involved is, of course a matter of choice. I am involved in several of these groups, physical ones and virtual ones. Let’s look at the physical ones first.
 

Members of Angus Writers' Circle

The first group I became involved with was Angus Writers’ Circle http://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk/anguswriterscircle/index.html I was one of the founder members over 20 years ago. At that time I was a novice writer and much of my writing really wasn’t worth publishing. I’ve progressed since then, my writing has improved, and I’ve become a professional writer. Now I don’t know whether I would have had the same outcome if I’d never belonged to Angus Writers’ Circle, but I can say that the crits and encouragement I experienced along the way did help me develop as a writer.
 
I have to say, though, that there are writers’ groups in existence which simply give praise irrespective of the quality of writing. These groups do nothing to help a writer develop. The groups that are of the most benefit are the ones which are honest with their crits, even if the truth hurts.
 
One of the benefits of belonging to a writers’ group is acceptance to professional bodies like the Scottish Association of Writers. I have attended their weekend conferences on a regular basis over the past 20 odd years, and have been awarded many prizes from their annual writing competitions. The most prized of these was when I won the Pitlochry Award on two different occasions, once for Night Watcher, and again for Dead Wood before it went on to win the Dundee International Book Prize.
 

Margaret Thomson Davies presenting me with the Pitlochry Award for Night Watcher

But crits, encouragement and awards are not the only benefits from belonging to these groups, there is also the social aspect, the networking, and the acceptance from other writers. I met many of my now more famous friends through these groups, at a time before they became famous. People like Ian Rankin and Alex Gray. I could name many more, but enough of the name dropping and let’s get on with the blog.
 
It’s time to have a look at virtual groups. There are many of these around, particularly on Facebook. I’ve sampled a few of these and when they become overloaded with ‘buy my book’ posts to the exclusion of most of the other posts, I usually back out the door and only look in occasionally.
 

The exception to these is the three main groups I’m heavily involved with. I’ll take them one at a time.

 
First there’s the loveahappyending.com group which is an invitation only group for authors, although they also have readers, editors and publishers as members. This group started a year ago and as of this morning there have been over a million visits to the website. When I was invited to join, I think my first response was ‘You do know what kind of books I write?’ You see I never thought of my books as being anything to do with happy endings. The response when it came was that they wanted a mix of authors and anyway, in my crime books, the fact that the crime was resolved equated to a happy ending. So I agreed to join and actually felt quite honoured to be one of their thirty authors, because that was the maximum amount they take on as members at any one time. If you want to have a look here is the link http://loveahappyending.com/
 

 
Then there is the Famous Five Plus group, FFP for short http://www.famousfiveplus.com/ I saw this coming to prominence on Twitter and became curious, so that was why I joined it. I’ve had no regrets about joining, although members are expected to promote the group through Twitter and other media sites. That’s why you’ll see me with loads of retweets involving FFP. But it’s a fabulous group with lots of lovely members who are supportive. The website’s pages are worth checking out, they have a Home page, Books page, Authors page, Review page and loads more. They also post an excerpt from one of the books every day. I love it when it’s my turn. Oh, and they also have a readers’ club if you would like to join. The details are on the Books page of the site here’s the link http://www.famousfiveplus.com/p/books.html
 

 

 

Last and not least, there is the Authors Electric group, which again is an invitation only group. Each member is expected to provide a blog post for their blog – Do Authors Dream of Electric Books. My turn is on the 19^th of each month if you want to check me out. The blog itself is a mix of posts from various writers and is well worth a look. Here’s the link http://authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk/

 

 
Well, that’s an overview of the groups I’m involved with and all I can say is that I find them beneficial. However, whether you would is a different matter and only you can decide whether to join a group or not. The only advice I would give is, be selective.

  

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

 

Harrogate Crime Festival 2012 – Part 2

Friday at Harrogate started out with John Connolly who was interviewed by Mark Billingham, and I’m not sure which of the two was most under the weather. John Connolly, of course is known for his Charlie Parker novels which are set in America rather than his native Ireland.
 

John Connolly in full flow at Harrogate

 
His first book, Every Dead Thing, took him 5 years to write and he was rejected by everybody. He said that in every book he’s written he reaches the stage where he thinks it’s awful but he still has to finish it, and his first book was no different, if he hadn’t finished it he would never have written another book. He thinks that doubt is the thing that makes a book, and that every writer is doubt ridden, they live in fear of rejection. He still lives in perpetual fear it will all fall apart and being dumped is just round the corner. This was an honest and entertaining interview and I noticed the fear of rejection was a constant theme that was echoed by many writers during the weekend.
 
It would be far too lengthy to describe all the panels that took place on Friday because the day was so packed, so I’ll only include the highlights as I saw them.

Crime in Another Dimension Panel at Harrogate

 

The second panel of the day which was based on novels with a science fiction or urban fantasy setting was hilarious. It frequently went off track, and I’m not sure we learned anything, but there was loads of humour and the audience laughed a lot.

 

Wanted for Murder: The E-Book panel at Harrogate

 
A mid morning panel was also lively but in a different way because this is a subject that is quite contentious. It had the title Wanted for Murder the E-book. The panel included a well known writer of e-books, Stephen Leather; bookseller Patrick Neale; author, Steve Mosby; agent, Philip Patterson; and VP of the Publisher’s Association Ursula McKenzie; which I thought was weighted more to the traditional publishing model than the e-publishing one. To me Stephen Leather seemed to be the only one really defending the e-book corner, and he took some whacks from the others as well as from the audience. I kind of felt a bit sorry for him, although he did put his foot in it several times. Still, it couldn’t have been a comfortable experience and probably knocked him off course.
 
Some interesting points that came out of the panel were:-

• Three years ago Little Brown, Publisher, were only selling 3% e-books, they are now selling 20% overall, and 30% fiction.
• Stephen Leather sold 5% the first year he published e-books, and last year he sold half a million. He is now selling three times more e-books than his traditionally published print books. He sees the future as being 90% in favour of e-books.
• There is no e-book market in Germany or France (maybe that’s why I haven’t sold any there!)
• The cheaper than chips argument – the notion that an e-book does not exist physically, does not mean they should sell for 49 pence, although when physical costs disappear they should be cheaper. There was a view that cheap e-books undermine all books, with the assumption that it is independent authors who are pushing cheap books. Interestingly it came out several times over the course of the weekend that MacMillan (traditional publisher) was offering 20 pence books on Amazon. (If you’re interested look up Peter James books)
• Publishers will not vanish with the advent of e-books because a lot of authors won’t want the hassle of doing the business side of things, therefore they will need a publisher and/or agent to do this for them.
• Book sales – the bookseller indicated hardbacks were selling better than ever and thinks it will only be paperbacks in jeopardy from the rise of e-books.
• Stephen Leather thought a fair price for e-books was 70 pence for short stories; £1.99 for novellas; and £3.99 for novels. However he does give away some free books as a promotion for his paid books.

Interestingly there was quite a bit of aggro from the audience at question time, with many of the questions aimed at Stephen Leather, and I understand that since the conference there have been a lot of quite vicious comments floating around on Twitter. Phew, who would think a panel could produce that kind of reaction.
 
Here are 2 links to follow up to get a flavour of that aggro:-

http://www.publishingebooks.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/appearing-at-harrogate-plot-thickens.html

http://www.theleftroom.co.uk/?page_id=243 (there are now 2 posts in this one, read the bottom one first)

 

Writing for Your Life panel at Harrogate

 
Writing for Your Life was a panel of former intelligence agents and investigative journalists who went into detail about the risks involved with acquiring information for their books. I was quite interested in Tony Thompson’s book Gangs which I thought would come in useful in relation to my own writing. He was a really nice guy and I had my photo taken with him.
 

Tony Robinson and me

 
The day had passed quickly with loads of panels, and all of a sudden it was 8.30pm and time to listen to Kate Moss, the author of Labyrinth, and the evening’s special guest. She was interviewed by Dame Jenni Murray from BBC Radio 4, and Jenni can always get the best out of her interviewees. It was an interesting session and hearing Kate talk about Labyrinth which she wrote as an adventure story was enough to make me download it to my Kindle. I think one of the things that attracted me to it was her interest in myth, magic, folklore, and nonsense, the gap between logic and the dark part. Now how could I resist that.
 

Special Guest: Kate Mosse at Harrogate

 
I bet you’re thinking the day was finished when we left the session at 9.30pm, but you’d be wrong. There was still the Special Guests Late Night Conversation between Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson. This started at 10pm and was, quite frankly unusual and interesting. The stage was laid out like a pub, complete with beer pump, table and chairs. Ian and Peter sat at the table, beer glasses in hand, and just chatted. Every now and then they would get up and refill their glasses from the pump. It was as if the audience wasn’t there, and I reckon they must have been quite merry by the end. I liked Ian’s description of what they were doing – ‘Two old farts sitting at a table’. They covered a variety of topics such as:-

• Whether or not to watch their TV series. Ian prefers not to.
• The return of Rebus.
• Trends and changes in crime fiction and the rise of lots of new writers. They both thought it was a different world now with changes in technology, although there was still a place for traditional crime fiction.
• Screw ups.
• Music.
• Being in a band or group.
• e-books.
• The Killing.
• Scandinavian fiction.

They thought it was a bit scary how quickly the world has moved on, and that their earlier books seem historical now. There was lots more but I think I’ve given the gist of it. So, at the end it was time to stagger to our rooms, although many of the audience went there via the bar.

 

Peter Robinson and Ian Rankin in a late night conversation at Harrogate

 
It was the end of another exhausting but exhilarating day. I’ll bring you Saturday’s events the next time, so watch this space.

http://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk

Harrogate Crime Festival 2012 – Part 1

It’s that time of year again – the time all crime writers look forward to – the Harrogate Crime Festival, where crime writers and readers gather to celebrate crime fiction in all its varieties.

Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate, where the crime conference is held

I’m not entirely sure what you would call a gathering of crime writers – would it be a murder of crime writers? Maybe not, because we don’t want to be associated with crows. After all it’s a murder of crows, isn’t it? What about a massacre of crime writers? Do you think that would suit any better? If you have any ideas I’d love to hear them.

Anyway, whatever you call them, you won’t find a bigger gathering anywhere this summer, than Harrogate. They all gather at the Old Swan Hotel, that’s the one where Agatha Christie was found after her vanishing act more years ago than I care to remember.

This is the tenth Harrogate Crime Festival, although to give it its proper title I should be saying the Theakstons Old Peculier (yes the spelling is correct) Crime Writing Festival. The first one took place in 2003, and it was meant to be a small weekend of literature events that would be part of the larger Harrogate International Festival. However, probably because of the early involvement of Val McDermid, it was like Topsy, it grew and grew, until it is now the largest and most prestigious crime fiction event in Europe.

Over the years many of the biggies of the crime writing world have appeared at Harrogate, including PD James, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Alexander McCall Smith, and many more. Not forgetting our international counterparts such as Jeffrey Deaver (a favourite of mine), Michael Connolly, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Jo Nesbo, I could go on and on. But you don’t want a list of names of the world’s most prestigious crime writers, do you? You want me to get on and tell you about this year’s festival. The only thing is, there is so much going on, there is no way I’ll be able to get it all into one blog post, so I’ll talk about each day in a separate post, so you’ll just have to watch this space

Well, I arrived on Thursday afternoon. There were people there before me because the festival runs a creative writing day prior to the opening events on Thursday evening. I have taken part in the creative writing day in past years and it is something well worth attending. But because I didn’t do it this year I won’t comment on it.

Mark Lawson, from BBC Radio 4 Front Row

The festival started on Thursday night with the presentation of the awards. Mark Lawson introduced this with a hilarious speech, and I’m sure the laughter could have been heard in Harrogate town centre. The locals must have wondered what was going on.

Some of the bits I remember was where he referred to Cambridge being like downtown Detroit, and Oxford as the most lethal town in England, while going for a walk in Suffolk was quite risky because you’d be lucky to return from it. He also reckoned that with the recent reported drop in UK crime figures we’d all soon be out of a job.

 

Colin Dexter, author of the Morse series

Mark Billingham then came on stage to announce the recipient of the lifetime award for an outstanding contribution to crime fiction. This was presented to Colin Dexter, by Simon Theakston, the festival’s sponsor. Colin entertained us with a short speech, laced with his usual dry humour, and he got a standing ovation from the audience. He was a very popular choice for the lifetime award. But I wasn’t surprised by this, because Colin is a lovely man whom I’ve had the honour to meet on several occasions, and I still treasure the photograph he gave me earlier this year, of his portrait which hangs in the Randolph Hotel.

After this came the presentation of the Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award which was won by Denise Mina, for End of the Wasp Season. I’ve read Denise’s Garnethill trilogy and she’s a great crime writer, so I made a note to myself – get End of the Wasp season as soon as possible.

Denise Mina with the Theakston Old Peculier award for crime novel of the year

We finished up with the Festival opening party, which was mobbed and quite quickly became uncomfortably hot. However, no one seemed to mind and there was lots of networking, chatting and meeting up with old and new friends. I spent a fair bit of the time with Sonia, Lucy, Justine and Isobel, and we had a lovely time.

The top tier of the cup cake mountain at the festival party

Oh, and by the way, Justine is now my BFF because she told me she’d read my book, Dead Wood, and loved it. She also said she was reading another author (quite a famous one, who shall be nameless), and thought my book was the better of the two. Yay, The perfect end to a perfect day.

From left - Isabel, Lucy, Sonia, and Justine

Well, that’s Thursday taken care of, I’ll write about the Friday events in the next post, so watch this space, and I’ll try not to be too long.

http://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk