Bloody Scotland: Conference Report by Marsali Taylor

 

I arrived on Friday to Stirling in its most bustling mode: people everywhere, sunshine on the red berries and
golden leaves, and the Golden Lion Hotel, (see photo left) Albert Halls and Trinity Centre festooned with crime scene tape and Bloody Scotland’s distinctive logo. The Golden Lion bar was already full of authors, publishers and press folk, for this was Scotland’s biggest crime  weekend.

 My first panel was Cosy Killers with

Sally Smith, Ian Moore and Orlando Murrin.
A very entertaining panel chaired by Vaseem Khan. 

Ian Moore is the author of a French set-series, with the latest being Death in Le Jardin; Sally Smith is an ex-QC, whose debut A Case of Mice and Murder, takes place in the Temple, and former Masterchef semi-finalist Orlando Murrin drew on his experiences for his debut novel, Knife Skills for Beginners. Khan started by asking whether they liked or loathed the term ‘cosy crime’. Moore liked being a genre writer but didn’t like the way people looked down on ‘cosy’; Smith didn’t like the term, which she felt was used for anything that wasn’t amazingly graphic; she saw ‘cosy’ as ordinary life with a body thrown in. Murrin quite liked it, but felt it was defined by negatives: not PP, not graphic. Khan’s own take was that ‘cosy’ was like real life, often with a note of humour – he felt writers use this as a way to talk about the world.  Other terms, Khan said, were ‘modern cosy’ or ‘aenemic crime’. He liked ‘clever crime’. Smith thought genres should be abolished – just call them all crime stories.

Moving on to their key characters, Vaseem Khan asked how much of the author 

was in their books. Moore said that, like Raymond, he ran a B&B in rural France and was hiding from the world .... however, his B&B didn’t include a gorgeous female bounty hunter / possible assassin – he wanted to add a touch of 60s exoticism. Her enthusiasm drags Raymond into the case.

Orlando Murrin admitted his victim was based on a chef he’d known (now dead) – there could be intense rivalry between chefs, and he’d seen this adulation of someone who was a has-been. Smith’s novel is set in 1901, when there weren’t many barristers, and they were treated almost like film stars. Her hero is typical of the time: aristocratic family, Eton, Oxford, Innns of Court – he’s paralysed in this world, and become law-obsessive – he loves it all, but the murder drags him out of his routine. She had fun adding a copyright case into the mix – in the Old Bailey.

All three authors agreed that a closed-circle mystery is part of ‘cosy’ but also of most crime novels – there is a small number of suspects. Sally Smith explained the historical law of sanctuary; the Temple is an enclosed community, with porters on gates. The original Knights Templar land and church was taken over by lawyers in the 1300s, and it’s an ‘ancient liberty’ – outside the jurisdiction of everyone but the lawyers who run it. Even the police need consent to go there. She’d had her launch at the Temple church, and all her fellow barristers had been very supportive.

Finally, what next? Moore has just handed in Death and Boules; Smith was writing the sequel; Murrin’s second book will be out in March; Khan’s fifth Malabar house book is on its way, along with a standalone, but his big announcement is that next October will be the first of his books starring Q: Quantum of Menace.

Dark Islands was the panel I was chairing, with George Paterson (Westerwick), Liz Webb (The Saved) and Claire McGowan (Truth, truth, Lies). 

We started off by designing our ideal murder island, then talked about the actual islands which had inspired the authors. Liz Webb’s (see photo left) Langer was based on the slate islands, which also was a key metaphor in the book; Paterson’s Westerwick was as much a state of mind as a place, but the book’s other island was the West End of Glasgow;

Claire McGowan’s island was an imagined ‘lost paradise’ for some of her characters gathered there, a place of dread for others. We moved on from there to discuss ‘insider or outsider’; Webb’s Nancy was definitely an outsider given time at last to confront her own past; Paterson hedged his bets with two main characters, and McGowan (see photo right) covered both bases with multiple narrators, the key two being one of each. The panellists had a very lively discussion about this, and then moved on to how like their own characters they were - the audience got a good laugh when they turned to me as one and chorused, ‘You’re definitely Cass!’ I wish ... Afterwards, the audience commented on how much they’d enjoyed it.

My next event Richard Armitage, was preceded by a Spotlight moment, in which debut author Jake Bowen-Bate read from The London Agency, a thrilling start with the police shooting a young man.

Armitage was interviewed by Bryan Burnett, and this was a sell-out event.  Burnett asked him first if it was easier to be on stage talking about his own words – his debut novel, Geneva.  Definitely easier! – he’s responsible for every word of it. Armitage explained that he’d had an invitation from Audible to be a ghost-writer, and he said absolutely not, but he’d write a novel of his own. He had to audition his writing style and give an outline and character breakdown. The genesis of his story was a memory of the woman in the old film Too Long at the Fair tearing at the wallpaper to find her brother – gaslighting. For him, stories came in pictures – he’d dream of scenes and characters vividly. He’d travelled to Geneva to find a hotel for the setting, and found the perfect one, with all the corridors the same. For the character of Sarah, he

wondered why someone of her integrity would back this dubious technology, and decided she was doing it for her husband – it would be sold as a possible help for Alzheimer’s. She was being used as a ‘face’ for the product, but then lost control. He didn’t envy people who were famous; he’d seen others suffering from self-doubt and envy, and there was the constant obligation to promote the work. He didn’t see himself as a celebrity author; he’s always been a storyteller in different ways, and enjoyed the thrill of making words come alive. 

Burnett asked him about the transition from acting to writing, and Armitage said that he writes out loud, speaking the words, then writing them – trying out the voices of the characters – he gave us a brief imitation of Schiller. He felt not all words were written to be read aloud – Dickens definitely was – and he was passionate about the physical aspect of language. He’s well-known for his audio work – ‘I haven’t read for pleasure for twenty years!’ he said – and for that he imagines he’s talking to just one reader, and making up the story as he goes along. For the future, he’s proofing his next book – he’s always conscious that he may be ‘big’ now, but there’s always the day the phone stops ringing.

Judging by the audience reaction, that day is a long way off. 

My last panel of the day was at 10pm, The Wickedest Link, with committee member Craig Robertson taking on Anne Robinson’s mantle as quizmaster, and Festival Director Bob McDevitt as the disembodied voice booming out the scores.

The contestants were Chris Brookmyre, still on a high from having won the McIlvanney prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year with The Cracked Mirror, Elly Griffiths, Lilja Sigurdardottir, Marion Todd,
Mark Billingham, Tony Kent, Vanda Symon and Vaseem Khan.
(see photo above)

The questions varied from even I know that! to nobody knows that! and the game was livened up by being able to ‘bank’ winnings so far at strategic intervals. After seven hilarious rounds only Lilja and Mark were left in play, and Mark won on a sudden-death finish, having banked £500 for the charity he chose, Macmillan Cancer.

I didn’t rush my Saturday morning, in spite of the temptations on offer, but started off mid-morning with
The Rest is History.

Eleni Kyriacou, David Greig and A J West, chaired by David Bishop, began by telling us about their novels.

The Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou is a true, compelling, story of a Cypriot grandmother with no English and only spoken Greek being arrested in 50s London for the murder of her daughter-in-law. Kyriacou explained how she immersed herself in real documents: statements, letters, Press accounts. Much of this was very grim and dark, so she lightened it by giving her translator a job as the coat-check girl at the Cafe de Paris, patronised by film stars and royalty. The 50s in Soho were a mix of really dangerous times and glamour. For her, the book was about loyalties, choices, and about what drives people to do terrible things. It was a    challenge writing about this murderer, but she read a warden’s account of her crying in her cell, then dancing round and blowing kisses – she was obviously not well. She wanted to make the reader sympathise with Pavlou.

David Greig’s Columba’s Bones (‘A very funny book’, Bishop said) is set in 825, with a Viking raid on Iona, Greig’s protagonist is an ageing Viking who’s left for dead and wakes up left with one surviving monk, a
mead-making woman and no boat back to Norway till autumn. Greig said he felt people in the past were the same  as us, but you’ll never know what it was like to be there. One lovely day he was looking out over the countryside thinking it might not have been that bad to be a peasant, until he remembered the raider Swein coming over; easants had thoughts about war and peace too. He got very involved in his characters and was glad to kill Swein off. He compared writing a novel to playwriting: with plays, there were constraints of cast, stage limitations, set and the challenge of plays existing in time, where every second counts; in fiction, he felt there was a kind of intimacy – you were writing for the reader, who could put it down at any time.

A J West set out to bring the eighteenth century world of the ‘mollyhouses’ back to life –as a gay man himself, he empathises with  the horror of standing at Tyburn in front of a screaming mob, about to be hanged for the crime of sodomy. He shared a real-life account where homophobe Ned Ward, the leader of a vigilante society, described a mollyhouse as a women’s gossip circle with each man having his own female character. Activities included a mock birth. He recognised the language from gay pubs today, and found the Old Bailey accounts of men tried for sodomy both surprising and tragic. He’d rewritten The Betrayal of Thomas True three times – it started at 160,000 words, was told to ‘just tweak it’, found that didn’t work, so rewrote it; it was then accepted by Orenda, who asked for more of the love story, so he started again. He loved the characters and enjoyed each rewrite. He couldn’t shy away from the depths and cruelty, he felt he owed it to the real life men to describe that, but he tried to give them good times too.

David Bishop quoted ‘To know a society, read its crime fiction’. Did the authors feel their novels gave an insight into that past society? All three did. Kyriacou felt that the 50s had a glamourous image, but were dangerous times, especially if you were someone from another country. She felt that historical fiction needed to resonate today; that’s how you made people care about the past. West felt his novel shone a light on a gruesome aspect of C18 society,and the horrible behaviour of people en masse, for example the celebrations at a Tyburn hanging, but there was also great solidarity. The largest mollyhouse in London was run by Mother Clapp, and she looked after her men, lied for them at their trials, and died in the end at the pillory – she was very brave. He also spoke of the non-gay people who stood up for the men at their trials, friends and neighbours – he wanted to reflect that. For Grieg, his book was about the arrival of conscience; the Christian good/bad juxtaposition was a whole new world view.  He felt that though people who believed they were doing right could do awful things, could be much more dangerous than bad guys, it was better to have a religion, however absurd, because if you had no beliefs all that was left was power, and that created people like Sweyn.

Bishop asked if there were any wonderful bits of research that they had to leave out. Kyriacou said cigarette brands and fashion; Greig had written a wonderful scene involving a rabbit before he found out there weren’t any on Iona in 825; West mourned having cut a wonderful celebrity trans woman called Princess Seraphina, who promenaded in London in women’s dress. At her Old Bailey trial, her friends referred to her as ‘she’, confusing the Judge. ‘She was a scene stealer,’ West said, ‘saying “no plot but me.” She’ll live again in a short story.’

I love history and had already been enthralled by Kyriacou’s novel. I’ll certainly be buying Greig’s and West’s – they both sounded fantastic.

 Straight after that I was off to join the CWA Scottish Chapter’s Bloody Scotland lunch at the Sida Thai restaurant. There ended up twenty-two of us and a baby. Vaseem Khan, our current CWA chair, made time to join us, and gave a great short speech, the restaurant did us proud and it was a wonderful get-together.

A bit of fresh air next, with a True Crimes Tour of Stirling, guided by a University librarian. We started off with Scottish suffragette Ethel Moorhead, who broke into the Wallace monument and left a suffrage message on

Wallace’s sword, then went on to Victorian socialist activists (hanged and beheaded), a mugging, a wife murder, body snatchers paid by a man who became Queen Victoria’s physician – at this point a raven perched on a nearby gravestone and watched us in a brooding fashion. A nearby grave was, after some complicated geneaology, the great-uncle of Robert Leroy Parker – yes, Butch Cassidy himself. At the Kirk steps we were shocked to hear of a man convicted of playing golf on a Sunday, and our last criminal was Gentle Johnny Rominsky, safe-breaker extrordinaire, whose last crack was in Stirling. We ended the tour with a dram in the Curly Coo pub.

At dusk I headed up to the Trinity Centre for The Witching Hour with Michael J Malone (The Torments), Kate Foster (The King’s Witches) and Suzy Apsley (Crow Moon). 

Kate Foster began with explaining the background to her novel: the storm destruction of Anna of Denmark’s fleet as she came over to marry James VI. At that time there was a lot of religious and witch persecution on the Continent. James was exposed to these ideas, and wrote Demonologie,  which sparked off the witch persecutions in Scotland. Anna is one of the main characters; her maid Kirsten is fictional, and Forster used the witch testimonies, given under torture, for her third main character, Jura. She would have been a nurse today, Forster explained, using herbal medicine, but she also has supernatural beliefs – at this point there was still a mix between Christianity and older beliefs. James was a fervent Protestant, and worried about the safety of his throne; as God’s representative on earth, he believed the Devil would be after him, so pointed the finger at the weakest in the community the “witches”. Because witches were evil, anything was permitted by way of torture to make them reveal their crimes. They were strangled then burnt – a personal way to kill someone.

Michael J Malone’s novel is paired with his previous The Murmurs. His main character, Annie, is accused of being a witch. He also explained the Banshee who appears in the story – a kind of fairy vampire creature if not summoned correctly. His book had a sense of a real world – he was driving round looking for places! He saw the sun glinting off a house on a hill, and that gave him an idea for a character – then, further down the coast, were the caves of Sawney Bean and his family, who preyed on travellers – they’d steal their belongings and eat the bodies. ‘However,’ he added, ‘the first mention of the story is in a much later English chapbook, so it might just have been anti-Scots propaganda.’ Annie’s a resilient character who has a twin – he has a twin himself, but with a quite different relationship.

The origins of  Susie Apsley’s novel were in a writing retreat – she was given human teeth in a matchbox as a stimulus, and her first story as a journalist involved human teeth recovered from a fire. Her protagonist Martha is very matter-of-fact, not believing in the supernatural. However the legacy of witchcraft is still there in the story, with a ‘moondial’ linked to the legend of a healer who could turn into a crow. The novel includes diary extracts from a ‘book of shadows’ - the story of an isolated woman who’d been persecuted.

 It’s a portrait of grief; Martha lost two children in a fire, but believes she could have saved them – she’s trying to redeem herself.

Is witchcraft still about today? The panellists were agreed that the mindset still was: the idea of the childless crazy cat lady, teenagers doing witchy stuff, witch phobia surfacing in modern society, like Twitter – the hounding of any woman who’s been successful, or male sports stars. Panellists described a spooky experience: Apsley had once stayed in a very, very old house, and woke convinced there was someone in the room – she had the leave the next day. Malone is a clinical hypnotherapist specialising in reiki, and he could sometimes ‘see’ things wrong with a patient. Foster mentioned Nicola Sturgeon’s apology for witches, but not a pardon, and that there’s no decent memorial to them – there’s a campaign for a pardon and memorial.

My final event of the festival was preceded by a Spoltlight: Susan Aliott read the atmospheric opening from The House on Rye Lane. Then the lights went up on Mark Billingham and Erin Kelly for a lively, light-hearted interview chaired by Marco Rinaldi.

Both authors were agreed that crime festivals and meeting readers were perks of this writing job – Erin Kelly said that she felt a book was reborn every time a new reader opened it. Crime festivals were a way to find other new authors, and to hear what the reader thinks – though, Billingham pointed out, they love to spot mistakes, and you can drench the pages in blood, but swearing is out! There are complaints about something being different but the writer also has to try and come up with something new each time. ‘Writing gets harder,’ Billingham said. ‘You’re always trying to write a better book.’ Kelly agreed: ‘It’s difficult to find the balance between what the readers want and rewriting the same book.’ ‘Does this book contain FGM?’ a reader once asked Billingham – and there are readers who read the end first - why? – or readers who finish a book they’re not enjoying. Both authors were sure books should be fun, not an obligation – ‘I give it 25 pages,’ Billingham said. Kelly advised avoiding people who criticise face to face (rarely happens) and be very restrained about looking at online reviews, though Billingham looked at his one-star reviews, for the comedy value. Both agreed they don’t leave negative reviews, or tag bad reviews on X.

The authors spoke about book styles: Mark Billingham wants to write humour. Life is tragic and funny. His new novel, The Wrong Hands, is still a PP, but if he thought of a joke, he put it in. ‘Miller’s very close to me; his first reaction is to find a gag. He can’t read a room, he says things that upset people. Grief affects everyone differently. However, I’m not a ballroom dancer!’ His villain is a bit of a buffoon, but he still kills people. Serial killers aren’t the master-villains found in books, they’re ordinary people – Fred West couldn’t read or write. Kelly doesn’t normally do series, but her new book, The House of Mirrors, is a companion book to The Poison Tree. ‘It was amazing,’ she said. ‘I didn’t have to spend time thinking of a new cast of characters, and it was so easy just to age the characters up. I hadn’t intended to go back, but it’s one book that still regularly gets fan mail. I gave one character my birthday, but otherwise, no, there’s no personality like me.

Plotting? Kelly’s was a layered story with a reveal, but writing it was very instinctive – she’d write and rewrite. Billingham bought a whiteboard, and started with an opening that left lots of questions, but he didn’t structure the book beforehand – ‘A plan’s limiting – you can’t follow a good idea you’ve just thought of. Writing’s like driving through a fog at night – you can see a bit of the way ahead, and you know your destination.’

 A last couple of light-hearted questions: who would they appoint to finish their MS if they died in the middle of it? Kelly: nobody; Billingham, Jeffrey Archer, to enrich his heirs. Finally, if you were on the run, which Bond would you want to chase you? Billingham went for Roger Moore, ‘because he couldn’t catch me’ and Kelly opted for Daniel Craig, ‘and I wouldn’t go anywhere.’

 That was it ... my Bloody Scotland over for another year. It was a lot of fun, and, as always, I went home having met old friends, made new ones, and found a load of new authors to try. Roll on September 2025!

Marsali Taylor grew up near Edinburgh and came to Shetland as a newly qualified teacher. Marsali is a qualified STGA tourist-guide who is fascinated by history, and has published plays in Shetland's distinctive dialect, as well as a history of women's suffrage in Shetland. She's also a keen sailor who enjoys exploring in her own 8m yacht, and an active member of her local drama group.  She lives with her husband.

www.marsalitaylor.co.uk