78 books like The Distant Echo

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.

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.

Ian is probably the most famous of all Tartan Noir writers. In fact the term Tartan Noir was coined when Ian met James Ellroy at a crime fiction event in Nottingham many years ago. Ian explained that he too was a crime writer and wrote about Edinburgh and the darker side of Scottish life. He said, you could call it Tartan Noir. Ellroy laughed and signed the book 'To the king of Tartan Noir'.

Black and Blue was Ian’s breakthrough novel and when you read it you can see why. Dark and compelling and complex, with perhaps greater depth than the ones that came before, this was my introduction to Rebus and remains a favourite still. 

For anyone about to enter the world of Ian Rankin’s Rebus, Black and Blue is the ideal way in, with plenty more in store.

I remember to the moment I opened this book. It was on a train to Inverness.

This was Chris’s first novel starring journalist Jack Parlabane and it had garnered great reviews. I couldn’t put it down, although I had to close it on occasions to recover myself from its hilarity and gruesomeness. 

Dark irreverent Scottish humour, it began Chris’s fabulous career in crime and thriller writing which continues to this day.

Chris Brookmyer is a genius, and we at Bloody Scotland can all agree on that. 

A day in the life of two inseparable friends in an impoverished Scottish town where everything seems challenging. They learn what friendship truly means in the face of certain dangers. Dillon’s award-winning debut depicts the vitality and intensity of boyhood friendship, as well as painting a vivid picture of contemporary working-class Scotland.

The Gustav Sonata started out as a short story called "A Game of Cards". Long after it appeared, Tremain felt she had wasted a very promising core idea on something essentially too short and too unexamined. The story and novel are set in Switzerland, which seemed safe as a neutral country during World War 2, but the government was torn between compassion for German Jewish refugees and the fear of devastating German reprisals if they took them in. Tremain tackles this dilemma through the stoical character of Gustav, who is Jewish and explores the ambiguities in the relationship between Gustav and his friend Anton, a gifted pianist who is crippled by stage fright. I found the themes sensitively and beautifully described.   

This classic novel is, if you think about it, absolutely about refugees – or to be specific, economic migrants, or more specifically, and because they travel within one country (the United States), they are IDPs – Internally Displaced Persons.

So many possible labels – put simply, they are the Dispossessed. Of Mice and Men is a story, set during the American Depression, of two migrant workers, George Milton and Lennie Small, who travel from job to job, sustained by their devotion to one another and by Lenny’s dream of owning a farm and looking after rabbits on it.

The book is a fierce railing against injustice and a tribute to friendship. It is also as moving now as it was when first published in 1937.

I received my first copy of this iconic book, a Bodley Head hardcover edition for my eighteenth birthday from a girl who worked in libraries and knew I liked books. I found the novel tough going initially, having been enraptured earlier by Joyce’s short stories Dubliners which were far more straightforward and accessible. But I went back to Ulysses at different stages in my life, reading different editions, determined to finish the book which I did three times and was glad I did as I learned more about the workings of this novel, loosely based on Homer’s epic, the more often I entered between its covers. In Ulysses, James Joyce paved a new way of looking at the world as it experimented with different modes of narrative, non-linear and without being enslaved to plot, and through his ‘epiphanies’ he saw and showed us the extraordinary in the ordinary things of… show more.

Okay, two books--but they’re really one. The Southpaw is about Henry Wiggen the baseball player finding his way in the major leagues.  A sports book by and large.  And then the fastball to the heart--Bang the Drum Slowly. The vagaries and tragedies of life intrude on the pristine baseball field, and Wiggen and the rest have to deal with reality:  boys grow into men; men sicken, men die. These books inspired me when I decided to become a writer of sports novels. They showed me that not only could I write a sports book about more than sports, but also that I needed to write a sports book about more than sports. Why bother otherwise? 

I’m pretty sure this was the first story about gay guys that I ever read. I had a book of Annie Proulx’s short stories I’d been meaning to read and stumbled across this particular one by accident. I only saw the film a long time later and that bowled me over too. The story is beautifully written, though find it so sad to read (and watch). Individuals struggling to come to terms with the way they feel is the essence of so many romances and this opened the door to all those that followed. She’s a brilliant writer.