Authors Electric

Life’s parallel tracks fascinate me. Or, at least, human beings’ ability to navigate them. They are a reflection of that dual personality propensity that lies within us all. My favourite classic writer - and fellow Scot - Robert Louis Stevenson, was also fascinated: his famous novel,  Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde , is only the ultimate expression of it. It can be traced in lots of his other novels too. I had a very real life- experience of this last month. Picture this: I am getting ready for my annual fortnight in The Hebrides and I trawl round the bookshops in the area (by email) and ask if they want any more copies of my Hebridean novel,  The Ghost of Erraid , for the tourist season, which is everyone's bread and butter there. I get several re-orders, gratifyingly . And  I get an invitation from one shop to be their featured author at one of their ‘Book Chat” events. Brilliant!  Now picture this: when my mother died suddenly at the age of fifty, I was twen...

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. So said the famous nineteenth century Scottish author,  Robert Louis Stevenson, who certainly knew a thing or two about travelling. Born in Edinburgh and suffering from ill health all his life, he was only too glad to forsake the 'draughty parallelograms' of that chilly city's New Town, with its grid of Georgian terraces.  He and his long-suffering wife braved many voyages to what was then called 'The New World'. In the last years of his life, he lived in the merciful climes of Western Samoa, where he was known and loved as 'The Tusitala'  (the storyteller). He is buried there, a quotation from his own poem on his tombstone:                                      Home is the sailor from the sea  ...

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. So said the famous nineteenth century Scottish author,  Robert Louis Stevenson, who certainly knew a thing or two about travelling. Born in Edinburgh and suffering from ill health all his life, he was only too glad to forsake the 'draughty parallelograms' of that chilly city's New Town, with its grid of Georgian terraces.  He and his long-suffering wife braved many voyages to what was then called 'The New World'. In the last years of his life, he lived in the merciful climes of Western Samoa, where he was known and loved as 'The Tusitala'  (the storyteller). He is buried there, a quotation from his own poem on his tombstone:                                      Home is the sailor from the sea  ...

One thing that I’ve always appreciated in fiction is a fully realised sense of place: a writer’s ability to bring a real or imagined landscape to life on the page or screen. Not too long ago, I read Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café , and found that it made the American Deep South – an area with which I’m actually unfamiliar – seem absolutely real and immediate. By the time I’d turned the last page, I felt that I’d just paid a visit to the Georgia town in which it was set. And, to McCullers’ credit, I hadn’t felt like a gormless tourist once, but almost like a local. Putting the book down, I was surprised to find myself back in Northern Italy on a chilly autumn night. Many of my favourite books share this quality: they allow the reader to immerse him- or herself in the world in which the story occurs. In the hands of a skilled author, the reader can move quite easily through an unfamiliar place, and never feel like a stranger. Place. It’s more than just a geographi...

Karen Bush - visit website I make no apology for offering all three of my top writing quotes from a single source: Terry Pratchett, who is, quite simply, a genius. “To be a writer you’re going to have to read a lot – shitloads in fact. So many books that you’re going to overflow. You’ve got to keep your mind open to all sorts of influences. You’ve got to sit down for hours at a time in front of a computer. And you must make grammar, punctuation and spelling a part of your life.” “There is one thing that I get asked all the time by aspiring writers who contact me. They say ‘I keep starting things; I don’t know how to finish them. I don’t seem to be able to find the time to write. I don’t seem to be able to get my ideas down on paper.’ What I always say is ‘Consider, just consider for a moment, that although you want to be a writer, being a writer may not be where your particular genius lies.” “I’ve always felt that what I have going for me is not my imagination, because everyon...

          Every year the Literary Review Bad Sex In Fiction Awards ‘draw attention to the crude and often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel.’           This year’s award went to Nancy Huston, an undeserved winner, I fear, although I note with a certain satisfaction (albeit of the purely cerebral kind) that Guardian readers voted resoundingly for the ‘big generative jockey’, while I myself also favoured the ‘elfin grot’ reference, but there you go. These things are very personal. Earlier this year, John Grisham endeared himself to me no end by describing how he had written an explicit sex scene and given it to his wife to read. She had collapsed into so much helpless laughter that he had decided it wasn’t his forte. Would that a few writers of literary fiction had so much insight, but perhaps their spouses are so overawed by their genius that ...

Chris Longmuir You’ve probably come across references to Tartan Noir on the internet and various other places, and if you walk into a bookstore in Scotland , the chances are you’ll see a display labelled Tartan Noir. But what is Tartan Noir? The name is an odd mix. The tartan part of the name smacks of tourism, kilts, heather and bagpipes, all the stuff that attracts people to Scotland , although it is not all that relevant in today’s modern world. The second part of the title –Noir – is more reminiscent of blood and gore, and all the horrible things that happen in the darkest of crime fiction. So it is an odd mix indeed. It was actually the American crime writer, James Ellroy who coined the name when he referred to Ian Rankin as the King of Tartan Noir in the 1990s. Since then it seems to have been taken up to describe Scottish crime fiction in general, and has now been given historical antecedents. The origins of Tartan Noir in Scottish literature are claimed to be ro...