Scotland

by Bill Kirton

I’m on a train. Leaving Aberdeen to go to Glasgow and spend a weekend with my daughter and her two sons. ‘So what?’ you ask. Well, I’m just feeling lucky to live in such a place and have the sort of freedom that lets me do such things. Because the sun is shining, the North Sea is sparkling and swirling round the base of its cliffs to my left and on the right there are fields, great rolls of gorse in full bloom and, in the distance, the folds and peaks of the Cairngorm Mountains. And this is just the relatively tame bit of the country. I know that, if I turned right when I got to Glasgow and drove along the coast, each turn of the road would make me want to stop, get out, breathe the air and take a photograph which would never do it all justice.

I know there are beautiful areas in almost every country but, for me, the west coast of Scotland is a magical place. The mountains dive straight down into the sea lochs and their Gaelic names give them all a specific character. One of my favourites is An Teallach – the sleeping man. As you drive towards it, that’s what it looks like – some giant has decided to have a nap and has stretched out on his side. Nearby is Slioch. Many years ago, I canoed the length of Loch Maree, which lies beneath and along it. It took several hours and, whereas normally you feel your progress in relation to places on the shore, Slioch seemed to just stand there, not budging. I know, I know, mountains don’t budge. It’s not in their nature, but try spending some time amongst them and you feel there are presences there. It’s their place, not yours. As I’ve said before, I’m not a believer in anything religious or paranormal, but the Scottish Highlands don’t fall easily into rational definitions. Yes, they’re geographical things, but their silences, the ruined cottages you see here and there and some other indefinable sensations recall the people who lived here. It’s not a romantic fancy to feel that life lived here is qualitatively different from the noisy complicated way we pass our days now. In these mountains, we know that we’re small, absurd intruders, but we also know we’re part of something that stretches beyond our comprehension and suggests that somewhere, buried miles deep in our psyche, is the knowledge that we belong here.

Unfortunately, so do the midges. I don’t think it was a snake which drove Adam East of Eden, I think it was a midgie.

Bill Kirton Joins Our Blog Team From Scotland

by Jean Mead

Bill Kirton began his career as an English actor, playwright and broadcast script writer. He now balances his police procedural novels with promotional work for North Sea oil companies at his home in Aberdeen, Scotland. He has also written a series of study skill books for students as well as dissertations.

His latest novel to appear was The Figurehead. "It’s a historical crime novel set in Aberdeen in 1840. It came about because a friend said to me one day ‘You should write a book about a figurehead carver. I had no idea why he said that but, since my PhD was on the theatre of Victor Hugo and I love the whole revolutionary period of the 1830s and 1840s, I did some research and found I loved it. Readers of crime are very sophisticated and know all about DNA and other arcane forensic processes, so it’s good to set a crime novel at a time before we enjoyed such refinements."

His research involved a lot of reading of contemporary newspapers and so on, "but also I wanted to know how it felt to carve a figurehead so I joined a woodcarving class and that became a hobby of mine. I also signed on as part of the crew of the beautiful Norwegian square rigger Christian Radich and sailed from Oslo to Leith for the Tall Ships Festival. That was a very special experience."

Asked when he knew he was a writer, he said, "I think there’s a difference between when I knew I was a writer and when I heard other people say I was. I knew it from very early days–probably when I was around 11 years old, because I used to enjoy writing things–mainly funny stories but also playlets (awful, awful things–I found one a few years back and while I suppose it was OK for someone of that age, it definitely didn’t show any early promise).

"As for encouragement, I don’t remember that with specific reference to writing, but Dad was a great reader and my brothers, sisters and I were all encouraged to do all sorts of things. But I was in my mid-twenties when I was invited to the newly opened Northcott Theatre in Exeter because a BBC producer, on the strength of some scripts I’d sent him, had told the director, the late Tony Church, that I was a playwright. Tony showed me round the place and we met one of his production team. Tony introduced me with the words ‘This is Bill Kirton. He’s a writer.’ I’d never heard it said before and I haven’t forgotten the pleasure it gave me."

Bill first wrote parodies of poetry for the school magazine and a couple of articles for the university newspaper but the first piece he was paid for was a radio play, "An Old Man and Some People," which was broadcast on Radio 3 and Radio 4 by the BBC in 1971, when he was 32. He's had several more plays broadcast since but considers his first his best..

He writes full-time because writing is also his day-job. He once served as a lecturer in the French department of Aberdeen University, "but I also did some TV and radio work. This led to me writing scripts for safety programmes and documentaries and then on into brochures, promotional and educational material and more or less all types of commercial documents and programmes. I live in Aberdeen, remember, so the oil industry always needed scripts and press releases. I was getting so much of that to do that I eventually took early retirement to concentrate on my writing.

"This balancing of writing fiction and hard commercial fact is interesting. I’m always aware that the commercial work is what earns the money but I’m always happier when I’m writing what I call my own stuff. The commercial material has its own rewards. Most companies want to say the same things about themselves (i.e. how brilliant, safe and environmentally responsible they are), so there’s a challenge in finding new ways of saying it."

He says the worst part of his commricial work is when the management of a company (and this has happened with the biggest oil majors as well as smaller outfits), can’t be bothered to give a specific briefing about what they want and instead, hand you a bunch of technical manuals or their last dozen brochures and say ‘It’s all in there’. This means I’m not only a writer, I have to second-guess which parts of the manual or brochures is still relevant, needs to be stressed, etc. It takes ages, costs them more money because of the extra time I have to spend on it, and almost always needs rewriting because they realise that they’d forgotten to tell me to include X or Y or something. . . But still, the fact that I can sit at home and make a living that way is far preferable to most other jobs I can think of."

What attracted him to mystery writing? "It seems as if all my answers are indirect because I didn’t really have this mystical thing which whispered to me ‘you must write a police procedural’. It was much more prosaic than that. I’d written mainly stage and radio plays and the occasional short story and one day I read of a novel-writing competition. So I started writing a novel. And that in itself was interesting because, like most other people, I thought ‘Wow, a novel. That’s long. Quite an undertaking.’ But I soon realised the perhaps obvious truth–that you don’t ‘write a novel’, you write a few sentences, some paragraphs and, at the end of each day, the pile of pages is that much bigger.

"And, if you’re enjoying it, you eventually see that it’s actually looking quite a substantial heap, so you’re determined to finish it. I did finish that one. It was a spoof crime novel and, in fact, I’m reworking it at present in the hope that a publisher might like it.

"Having done that, I was ready to write another and that one (which eventually became The Darkness was triggered by a chance remark made by a waiter at a local restaurant. He had an English West Country accent. I said ‘You’re a long way from home’ and he told me he’d chosen to come as far away from his home as possible because his wife and two daughters had been killed by a drunk driver who’d spent just six months of his sentence in jail and was then released. ‘Two months for each life’, as the waiter said. It affected me very deeply and I retained it. It eventually grew into my second novel, which was a stand-alone thriller. My then agent sent it to Piatkus, an independent publisher in London, who said ‘we like it but we’re not doing thrillers at the moment. Has he got any police procedurals?’

Bill works from about 8.30 a.m. until 6 p.m, with a fifteen minutes break for lunch, and "the time rarely drags. If I’m really into it, I go back for more in the evening, too. Watching football is my relaxation from writing and, when it’s a good game, I’d rather watch the game. Because I’m basically lazy. But I do love writing. When I’m into a novel, I’m completely absorbed by it. I have no notion of the passage of time, or of self or surroundings or anything. It’s a great privilege to be able to lose oneself so completely in an activity."

Gillian Phillip, Scottish YA Novelist

Gillian Philip lives and writes in the Scottish Highlands and is one of my favorite author interviews. The Aberdeen native began her writing career while living in Barbados, and her YA mystery/thrillers have been written for Hothouse Fiction, a UK book packager.

Gillian, I love your web site quote: “Taking dictation from people who don’t exist.” It sounds as though you give your characters free rein. How much do you know about a book before you begin writing?

Sometimes I know very little for certain, but I have a stew of ideas simmering away, and they won’t be pinned down to the page till they’re nicely cooked (this metaphor is losing its way). I like to have my main characters in place – and named with exactly the right names – even if I don’t know very much about them, or the secrets they’re keeping. So long as they have the right names, I know they’ll talk to me eventually.

And I absolutely have to have a title I like. I’m usually happy to change it eventually, but the story itself needs a name, just like the characters. I can’t relate to a file called ‘Working Title’ or ‘Book’. It’s like calling the dog ‘Dog’.

Why did living in Barbados for twelve years make you decide to write professionally? And what were you writing at that time?

We moved out to Barbados for my husband’s work, so there was no work permit for me. I went to the gym a lot, and went to the beach bar a lot more... and eventually I realised there was no excuse not to give my writing (or my liver) a chance. After all, I could hardly say I was pushed for time. So I wrote a short story, and sent it off to the People’s Friend, a UK story magazine. I was gobsmacked, and thrilled, when they accepted it. I wrote some more, and eventually they accepted another, and then more. I started writing for other magazines too, My Weekly and Woman’s Weekly.

I was happy to be selling stuff but I wasn’t all that happy writing short stories; I wanted to stay with my characters for a whole book. So I tried writing romance, and failed – it’s incredibly hard to get right – but it was all good practice, and it really gave me the novel bug. When we came back to Scotland in 2001, and I was buying children’s books for my new twins, I discovered modern Young Adult novels. And wham bam, I realised what really I wanted to write.

Tell us about your first YA mystery novel, Bad Faith, published last October, which sounds pretty street savvy.

Bad Faith is the story of Cassandra, who lives in a society run by the dictatorial One Church and its violent militias. She’s a privileged girl – her father is a cleric – but she has a dangerously subversive boyfriend, who’s an infidel. It all goes wrong for the pair of them when they discover the corpse of an important bishop, and – for reasons that seem perfectly sensible at the time–decide to hide it.

Meanwhile Cass is finding that her family has terrible secrets: some of them relating to the dead bishop, and some to a serial killer who once terrorised the country. Bad Faith is part murder mystery, part love story, and part political thriller. It was great fun to write – for half the book I was wondering myself whodunnit.

Your latest book, Crossing the Line, is due out this month. Tell us about your protagonist and the setting. And how important is humor?

Like Bad Faith, Crossing the Line is set in an unspecified Scottish town (though I confess that Aberdeen – where I grew up – had a big influence). Nick Geddes is a former bully and thug who’s trying to turn his life round, but it’s complicated. His old gang was responsible for the death of his sister Allie’s boyfriend. Now he not only has to look after the unstable Allie, and deal with his sometimes monstrous family - he’s also in love with the unattainable Orla Mahon, the dead boy’s sister.

I threw an awful lot at Nick, so it’s just as well he turned out to have a sense of humour. I do think the darker the story, the funnier it can be – it’s a matter of balance. I’m happy that Crossing the Line has been called ‘gruesome’ – but also ‘funny and touching’.

Working for a successful book packaging house must be an interesting job. What exactly does your job entail?

Hothouse Fiction is the book packaging company who created the Darkside books, about a parallel London where the children of Jack the Ripper live. The creative guys at Hothouse brainstorm concepts, come up with stories and great characters, and then put the ideas out to various writers, who tender for the books by writing sample chapters.

I’ve been contracted to write a series called Darke Academy. Hothouse gives me an outline and the characters, I write a draft, and then we work on the editing together. For me it’s a really different way of working, and I enjoy it.

With seven-year-old twins, when do you find time to write? What’s your schedule like?

I try to write in the mornings and, if I’m lucky, into the afternoon – even after the kids have come home from school, I’m a bit naughty about letting them sit in front of the Xbox or the television while I finish a chapter. If things are going really well, or I’m up against a deadline, I’ll work in the evenings. I try to keep weekends for family, but I tend to sneak back to the laptop... I confess, though, the writing quite often gets pushed aside for the joys of Facebook. That’s a temptation I really need to resist!

Which mystery sub genres are most popular in Scotland? And how do Agatha Christie’s amateur sleuth novels fare in today’s market?

There still seems to be a big demand for the gritty, ‘tartan noir’ side of crime fiction. I think Val McDermid and Ian Rankin will always be popular. Stuart MacBride is very dark, and he’s huge at the moment. But Alexander McCall Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency books are popular too, and they are very gentle in subject matter. There’s always room for both, I reckon. Agatha Christie is much more an English writer, of course, but I can’t imagine she will ever fall out of favour. She was featured in a recent episode of "Doctor Who", a wonderful and clever and wildly popular sci-fi series, so I hope that brought her yet another new generation of readers.

Which authors most influenced your own writing and why?

To an extent it depends on what I’m writing. Ruth Rendell is one of my favourite authors in any genre, and when I’m writing about crime I think I’ve been influenced by her non-Wexford novels in subject matter and viewpoint. I’m crazy about Malorie Blackman, a fabulous YA author who can do politics that make you cry. But I write fantasy too, and where that’s concerned, I’m influenced by everything from Alan Garner to the Marvel Comics and graphic novels of my teenage years. I was a huge fan of the X-Men, and I adored Wolverine even before he was Hugh Jackman in black leather (I adore him even more now that he is Hugh Jackman...)

Tell us about the Darke Academy Series that you’re currently writing.

The Hothouse series Darke Academy is about ancient spirits living in the bodies of modern teenagers. The students come from all over the world, and the Academy moves to a different exotic city every term – mostly because things tend to go horribly wrong for pupils who aren’t in on the secret. I’ve had a lot of fun locating adventures in Paris, New York, and (next time) in Istanbul. My heroine Cassie is a girl from a care home who thinks her life is changing when she wins a scholarship to the prestigious school – but she doesn’t realise, of course, just how big the ‘changes’ are going to be.