Authors Electric

Dundee University - College of Life Sciences where CAHID is based           Although death and dying are celebrated in some cultures, people living in Britain tend to shy away from it. Despite the fact that this is something that will happen at some point, the subject is rarely discussed. However, there is an exception to this, and that is crime writers. Perhaps they don’t speak about death, but they certainly embrace it in their fiction. In fact, looking at my own crime books, there is only one which doesn’t have dead or death in the title, and that is the first book of the Dundee Crime Series named Night Watcher . Book two is Dead Wood , and book three is Missing Believed Dead . Even my new series features this taboo word, and we meet my new investigator, Kirsty Campbell, in The Death Game .           So, when an invitation to be a friend’s plus one, on a visit to Dundee University’...

I was asked this question by an agent after a Society of Authors meeting when we were walking, along with loads of other people, to the restaurant where we had booked a meal. Now, my usual answer to this question is that I write crime novels, but this was an agent, and he was expressing interest, so I had to think hard. How would I describe my crime novels? The answer I came up with was that I wrote dark crime. Darker than Agatha Christie, but not as dark as Val McDermid, although I thought I leaned more towards McDermid rather than Christie. And no, I didn’t get an agent contract, and the guy was probably only making conversation because we were in the same group. But turning over this simple question in my mind I’ve started to wonder what kind of books I do write. I’ve written the Dundee Crime Series, but the only thing that makes these three books a series is because they are contemporary murder mysteries set in Dundee with the same investigative detective team. H...