For the latest SWH! podcast Ali spoke to writer Alan Parks about his latest Harry McCoy thriller, Bobby March Will Live Forever. The two discuss the world of Harry McCoy and those who share it, the importance of returning characters, why he set the novels in 1970s Glasgow, the city’s complex relationship with crime and its criminals, the inspirations for Bobby March, and why he is unlikely to write a novel based in the music business. The Harry McCoy novels are among the most

It can be difficult for a writer to make their mark in the crowded, thriving, marketplace that is Scottish crime fiction. Tartan Noir, as it has become know, is a national literary phenomenon with Bloody Scotland, the international crime festival, now one of the country’s biggest and most eagerly anticipated annual book events. As a result there are many writers, both new and established, turning their hand to crime (you can insert your own gag), but someone who made an immed

As regulars to SWH! will know, crime-writer Douglas Skelton is one of our favourite novelists. He has been a guest on our podcast, and his most recent novels, 2016’s The Dead Don’t Boogie & 2017’s Tag – You’re Dead both featured in their particular years’ ‘Best Of’ roundups. They were taken from his series of Dominic Queste novels, which feature a Glasgow gumshoe obsessed with film, noir, and film noir. Skelton has Queste speaking and acting as if he roams the streets of Broo

It is all too rare that contemporary Scottish fiction looks to its own rich past to tell us something new. James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack and John Burnside’s The Devil’s Footprints are two fine examples from the last 10 years which spring to mind, and there are echoes of both in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s latest novel His Bloody Project. Channeling Robert Louis Stevenson, James Hogg and even Arthur Conan Doyle, it’s a novel which leads you down deliberate and dark