Scottish novelists from William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin to Denise Mina deliver all the gut-punch thrills of crime without forgetting its human cost
Many crime novels end with a confession but I should start with one: whisper the heresy, but I’m not a big fan of tartan noir as a label for Scottish crime fiction. It works as an advertising slogan but doesn’t capture what the broad church of Scottish crime fiction is all about. There are so many fine novels within the canon that are either not tartan – with the archaic and cliched connotations that word can offer – or aren’t noir.
My new book, Watch Him Die, is half set in Glasgow and half in Los Angeles, so its shortbread credentials are hanging by a thread. It does, however, fit into a tradition of Scottish crime novels driven by issues of duality, redemption, the nature of good and evil, and a dark, dark, humour.
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