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I’ve been writing my DCI Warren Jones series for more than ten years now. In addition to trying my best to craft a compelling story, with relatable characters, I love the challenge of balancing this with authentic police procedure. All the books and authors recommended here are excellent exponents of this craft. I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of them, and believe that they have helped me improve as a writer. I deliberately chose the first in each series, in the hope that you will continue reading to see how the characters evolve.
Dead Man's Grave introduces DS Max Craigie and DC Janie Calder, along with the wonderfully irascible DI Ross Fraser.
This book combines not only an extremely good detective yarn with excellent procedure, in a beautiful location, it also does a very good job of setting up the premise for the rest of the series.
The author is a former Metropolitan Police detective, and although the location is Scotland, it is full of authentic police procedure. This book (and the series as a whole) has a well-balanced mixture of crime, police procedure, and well-developed characters with a generous splash of humour.
'The best police procedural I've read in years' Jane Casey
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 McILVANNEY PRIZE FOR SCOTTISH CRIME BOOK OF THE YEAR
'Grabbed me from the first page' Ian Rankin
This grave can never be opened. The head of Scotland's most powerful crime family is brutally murdered, his body dumped inside an ancient grave in a remote cemetery.
This murder can never be forgotten. Detectives Max Craigie and Janie Calder arrive at the scene, a small town where everyone has secrets to hide. They soon realise this murder is part of a blood feud between two Scottish families that…
Scotland’s greatest poet since Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, said that there were no traditions in writing, only precedents. He was thinking that, were traditions followed, adhered to, applauded, and praised, and prized too highly, then the danger of slavish repetition rather than creative divergence was too high. We need the mad moments, when all bets are off and something truly unpredictable will happen. I write with Scots modernist, postmodernist, and experimental precedents in mind. I want there to be Scots literature that reflects a divergent, creative nation, willing to experiment with words and life, and, in Alasdair Gray’s formulation, “work as though in the early days of a better nation.”
The most “please don’t do it” I have felt in response to a story is as Gray’s protagonist Thaw empties his pockets and throws his life documents and identifying possessions from a moving train on his way to his moment of madness. This will transpose or transform or, I suppose we must, translate Thaw into Lanark.
Critics have noted the many madcap imaginative moments in Gray’s large (in every sense) debut novel. The sequencing of the parts alone (Part 3, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4) is enough to signal we are in no realist story of a boy and man’s life in Glasgow – more, think surrealist – and yet the book is also just that, and Glasgow is a hell called Unthank in the imagination of an artist who lived all his life in Glasgow.
'Probably the greatest novel of the century' Observer 'Remarkable' William Boyd
Lanark, a modern vision of hell, is set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, and tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw. A work of extraordinary imagination and wide range, its playful narrative techniques convey a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying.
First published in 1981, Lanark immediately established Gray as one of Britain's leading writers.
I am a Scottish writer and have long loved books from and about Scotland. But I would love to see more written about the working-class Scottish experience from women’s perspective as I think that would lead to less focus on the violence and poverty that is featured in so many contemporary Scottish books from male authors. There is so much joy in the Scottish working-class experience – a pot of soup always on the stove in someone’s kitchen, the stories, the laughter, a community that cares for their own. Let’s see more of that, and more stories from and about Scottish working-class women.
This beautifully written novel tells the story of Kelly, as she makes her way home to Galloway from Glasgow.
Homeless and with addiction problems, Kelly experiences some of the problems that Glasgow is sadly well-known for, but what I really love about Paper Cup is that we see these issues from a middle-aged woman’s perspective so there is no glorifying of violence and excess.
Instead we are drawn into the precarious world of a vulnerable and damaged woman, and made to consider just how easy it would be for any one of us to slip through the cracks and tread the same path as Kelly. A truly thought-provoking read.
Rocked by a terrible accident, homeless Kelly needs to escape the city streets of Glasgow. Maybe she doesn't believe in serendipity, but a rare moment of kindness and a lost ring conspire to call her home. As Kelly vows to reunite the lost ring with its owner, she must return to the small town she fled so many years ago.
On her journey from Glasgow to the south-west tip of Scotland, Kelly encounters ancient pilgrim routes, hostile humans, hippies, book lovers and a friendly dog, as memories stir and the people…
Scotland’s greatest poet since Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, said that there were no traditions in writing, only precedents. He was thinking that, were traditions followed, adhered to, applauded, and praised, and prized too highly, then the danger of slavish repetition rather than creative divergence was too high. We need the mad moments, when all bets are off and something truly unpredictable will happen. I write with Scots modernist, postmodernist, and experimental precedents in mind. I want there to be Scots literature that reflects a divergent, creative nation, willing to experiment with words and life, and, in Alasdair Gray’s formulation, “work as though in the early days of a better nation.”
A Trocchi renaissance, including a film of Young Adam starring A-Listers Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, and Emily Mortimer, added to a growing reappraisal of Trocchi as a great Scottish writer, his reputation having been tarnished, fairly or unfairly, with drug use, indolence, and writer’s block.
Young Adam is a Scots crime novel the way James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a high-jinx picaresque, which is to say only technically, and on the understanding that Hogg and Trocchi sit head, shoulders and in fact a full body length above these genres. But moment of madness there is, and arrest, trial, judgment, and condemnation. But the twist is that Trocchi’s own judgment and condemnation of society is what matters.
Set on a canal linking Glasgow and Edinburgh, Young Adam is the masterly literary debut by one of the most important British post-war novelists. Trocchi's narrator is an outsider, a drifter working for the skipper of a barge. Together they discover a young woman's corpse floating in the canal, and tensions increase further in cramped confines with the narrator's highly charged seduction of the skipper's wife. Conventional morality and the objective meaning of events are stripped away in a work that proves compulsively readable.
I’ve always been a keen reader of crime fiction. A huge fan of both Agatha Christie and PD James in the Golden age of English crime fiction. I love American mystery writers too and have attended Bouchercon in New Orleans. Just after Driftnet was published and the Dr. Rhona MacLeod series launched, I was visiting a Crime Writers’ Association conference in Lincoln with my friend and fellow crime writer Alex Gray. That’s where the idea for a weekend promoting Scottish Crime writing began. When we launched it ten years ago, Ian Rankin said, "Scandinavia doesn’t have better crime writers than Scotland, it has better PR." That’s what we set out to change.
The Long Drop is a Scottish crime book like no other.
It features an imagined night featuring two key figures in the terrible world of one of Scotland’s most notorious murderers Peter Manuel.
In this long night of the soul Peter Manuel and William Watt wander through Glasgow and its underbelly as Manuel leads Watt on a journey of lies, drink, and trickery.
It is Tartan Noir at its most terrifying. A Jekyll and Hyde story of a night based on true events.
'A masterpiece by the woman who may be Britain's finest living crime novelist' Daily Telegraph
'Absorbing... this is a bravura performance, a true original' Ian Rankin
Glasgow, 1957. It is a December night and William Watt is desperate. His family has been murdered and he needs to find out who killed them.
He arrives at a bar to meet Peter Manuel, who claims he can get hold of the gun that was used. But Watt soon realises that this infamous criminal will not give up information easily.
Inspired by true events, The Long Drop follows Watt and Manuel along back…
I’ve been fascinated by crime ever since I was a junior reporter working on a daily newspaper and covered a huge number of court cases. I’ve written all my working life and turned to crime writing after reaching the final of a UK TV channel’s Search for a New Crime Writer competition. I’ve built up contacts within the police force during my career which has enabled me to write Storm Deaths, the first in a series of police procedural crime novels. I’ve seen so many films and TV shows that don’t follow the proper procedure, so I ensure that all my writing is as authentic as possible.
For more than three decades Ian Rankin has been the master of “tartan noir” – police procedural fiction set in Scotland. The curmudgeonly, hard-faced, no-nonsense detective Inspector John Rebus has a tendency to bend the rules as investigations take over his life.
A Song For The Dark Times starts with Rebus’ daughter Samantha calling him to say her husband is missing. Rebus fears the worst and from his experience realises that his daughter will be the prime suspect. You’re always on the edge of your seat wondering whether Rebus will have to prevent the truth from coming out and compromising his position as an upholder of the law.
I’ve always been a keen reader of crime fiction. A huge fan of both Agatha Christie and PD James in the Golden age of English crime fiction. I love American mystery writers too and have attended Bouchercon in New Orleans. Just after Driftnet was published and the Dr. Rhona MacLeod series launched, I was visiting a Crime Writers’ Association conference in Lincoln with my friend and fellow crime writer Alex Gray. That’s where the idea for a weekend promoting Scottish Crime writing began. When we launched it ten years ago, Ian Rankin said, "Scandinavia doesn’t have better crime writers than Scotland, it has better PR." That’s what we set out to change.
I still have my treasured original copy of Laidlaw by Willie McIlvanney, and also the more recently published edition.Laidlaw, as Willie said, is first and foremost a man, who just happens to be a policeman. My father was a detective, working on the front line, and we often saw the effect that had on him. So Laidlaw rang true to me, in its questioning, Who is the true monster among us? In its voice and rhythm, which sounded undeniably Scottish, and most of all, in its humanity.
Laidlaw inspired me to write my book. It also inspired me to help set up Scotland’s International Crime Writing Festival Bloody Scotland and the annual McIlvanney award for the best Scottish crime book.
First in “a crime trilogy so searing it will burn forever into your memory. McIlvanney is the original Scottish criminal mastermind” (Christopher Brookmyre, international bestselling author).
The Laidlaw novels, a groundbreaking trilogy that changed the face of Scottish fiction, are credited with being the founding books of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors like Val McDermid, Denise Mina, and Ian Rankin. Says McDermid of William McIlvanney: “Patricia Highsmith had taken us inside the head of killers; Ruth Rendell tentatively explored sexuality; with No Mean City, Alexander McArthur had exposed Glasgow to the world; Raymond Chandler had dressed the darkness…
I love to write about crime. I have no idea why. I don’t have any real-life experience of crime. Honest. I enjoy setting books in the places that I love to visit. So Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Nice all feature strongly here. And so far, the two novels I’ve written of which one is available on Amazon, have had strong female protagonists. I guess I find it interesting for a woman to take on a bunch of nasty men. And I studied art and the history of art at college, so everything I have written in terms of novels has been in the world of stolen art.
Another story of dark, hidden family secrets. I read this book a long time ago but it’s stuck with me and I need to re-read it soon. The story centres on a troubled auctioneer who discovers a collection of old family photos which catch his eye. But as he examines the photos deeper, he realises their content is a snuff movie before there was such a thing, leading him to delve into their owner's past.
'Unputdownable' Sunday Times 'I was hooked from page one' Guardian
When Rilke, a dissolute auctioneer, comes upon a hidden collection of violent and highly disturbing photographs, he feels compelled to discover more about the deceased owner who coveted them. Soon he finds himself sucked into an underworld of crime, depravity and secret desire, fighting for his life.
“Big Butt.” That’s all you need to know about me. It was the first song I wrote and recorded on a dusty cassette tape in 1986. I was 10 years old and an obsessive Prince fan. On the back of his records, he wrote some variation of “written, recorded, produced and performed by Prince.” Those words empowered me to be an artist. More specifically, here’s what I wrote as a 10-year-old: “When I grow up, I want to be a rock star like Prince.” Five years later, I started writing poetry, and all of the poems I wrote felt like songs. Music is the fuel for all that I create.
The moment I realized I was getting older was the moment I put two little pieces of toilet paper in my ears in the middle of a Mogwai show in Asheville, NC.
It was the loudest show I’d ever attended. And it was phenomenal.
Mogwai has been making cinematic music for a long time, and I came into awareness of the band with 2008’s “The Hawk is Howling.” They are epic, funny, mysterious, meditative, and relentless.
It’s no surprise that Stuart Braithwaite’s book is perfect for the Mogwai fanbase in that it gives some insight into the band’s philosophy while maintaining a sense of mystery. I also like that Braithwaite doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously.
Born the son of Scotland's last telescope-maker, Stuart Braithwaite was perhaps always destined for a life of psychedelic adventuring on the furthest frontiers of noise in MOGWAI, one of the best loved and most ground-breaking post-rock bands of the past three decades.
Modestly delinquent at school, Stuart developed an early appetite for 'alternative' music in what might arguably be described as its halcyon days, the late '80s. Discovering bands like Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, and Jesus and Mary Chain, and attending seminal gigs (often incongruously incognito as a young girl with long hair to compensate for his babyface features)…
My family maintained an emigrant’s romantic view of Scotland: tartan, ceilidhs, bagpipes, and shortbread in tartan tins. In 1978 I moved to Scotland after a political science degree to study bagpipes with one of the great masters of the time, and I was exposed to a very different Scotland. Living in Ferguslie Park, Paisley during Margaret Thatcher’s era, I was in the town with the worst social statistics in Europe, seeing poverty, crime, and trauma on the streets every day, and these books speak to that reality. They also describe the warmth and beauty of the people I met there, many of whom remain fast friends to this day.
I’ve passed by characters like these in the street and was once chased two miles down Paisley Road West at two o’clock in the morning by a gang of very inebriated youths, so reading Armstrong’s semi-autobiographical novel about growing up in the North Lanarkshire gang culture was challenging and engaging. It was challenging because it is written in the “patter” or dialect of central Scotland, and I found m’sel’ readin’ wi an accent in ma heid. Pure mental.
The Times top ten bestseller Scots Book of the Year 2021 Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award & Betty Trask Award 2021
'Trainspotting for a new generation' - Independent 'An instant Scottish classic' - The Skinny
2005. Glasgow is named Europe's Murder Capital, driven by a violent territorial gang and knife culture. In the housing schemes of adjacent Lanarkshire, Scotland's former industrial heartland, wee boys become postcode warriors.
2004. Azzy Williams joins the Young Team [YTP]. A brutal gang conflict with their deadly rivals, the Young Toi [YTB] begins.
2012. Azzy dreams of another life. He faces his toughest fight…
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