Cold, hysterical and snivellingly complacent

The Scot behind Brave and Harry Potter film scores on his good fortune and his huge debt to teachers

THE game-changing, award-winning Danish TV series The Killing was a potent cocktail of criminal investigation, political intrigue and family drama. Viewers in more than 100 countries tuned in not only to follow the clues and find out whodunit but also to relish the tight plotting, deft characterisation and absorbing storylines.

Twelve years on from the show’s original broadcast, its creator and scriptwriter Soren Sveistrup returns with another slice of Nordic noir, only this time in the form of a debut novel. The Chestnut Man – neatly translated by Caroline Waight – is a taut, high-octane thriller about two mismatched detectives on the hunt for an ingenious and particularly brutal killer. Sveistrup snares his reader with his house-of-horrors opening and keeps us gripped until the aftershocks of his denouement.

One October morning in Copenhagen the battered and mutilated body of a single mother is discovered at her home. One of her hands has been cut off and above her dangles a little doll made of chestnuts. Young, go-getting Naia Thulin of the major crimes division – aka murder squad – is assigned the case but to her dismay is partnered with Mark Hess, a washed-up, burned-out Europol liaison officer.

The pair set their differences aside when the fingerprints of a missing girl are found on the chestnut figure. Kristine Hartung, the 12-year-old daughter of minister for social affairs Rosa Hartung, vanished a year ago, and although a paranoid schizophrenic man was locked up for confessing to her murder, he can’t remember where he buried the parts of her dismembered corpse.

When a second woman is killed, this time with both hands severed, the fingerprints on the accompanying chestnut doll give Rosa a flicker of hope that her daughter might still be alive. However, that hope is snuffed out after Thulin and Hess are forbidden from reopening the Hartung case and tasked with devoting their energy to halting the

The Slab Boys was such a success casting directors would see me at the drop of a hat

WHEN Scottish composer Patrick Doyle catches himself being “new-agey” – and he is fascinated by the coincidences of good fortune that have materialised in his life – the Hollywood name he invokes by way of checking himself for being too much of a hippy is that of Shirley MacLaine rather than Gwyneth Paltrow.

If that suggests a man whose taste is for an earlier era of the silver screen, it is also true that he sits in age exactly between the two lifestyle gurus, the concerts of his music that are a feature of this year’s Celtic Connections in Glasgow being a celebration of his 65th birthday, which actually fell in the spring of last year.

It has taken a while for him to be able to carve out the time to accept the invitation from Celtic’s Donald Shaw to be part of the event, he concedes, but the result is concerts with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra that promise to be special one-off events.

Today at 2pm and 5.30pm in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall there are screenings of Disney’s Scottish fantasy animation Brave, with Doyle’s soundtrack performed live by the orchestra under the baton of Dirk Brosse and guest musicians who featured on the original recording. Then on Thursday, at Glasgow City Halls, the orchestra and Brosse perform a programme that combines selections from Doyle’s other film scores alongside new and old pieces that the composer has arranged for the occasion and which will feature contributions from members of his family.

“I was asked by Donald Shaw to write some original pieces, which I have done. I have written a piece for choir and orchestra that is a setting of William Dunbar’s poem Sweet Rose of Virtue which will be performed in the original old Scots by the Glasgow Phoenix Choir. The second new piece is a Scottish overture, which is about six minutes long and will be the finale of the second half.

“Plus I have a piece I wrote as part of a Celtic song cycle just for fun and which was used in the film Whisky Galore but has never been performed live. It will be sung by Maggie MacInnes and my two daughters are singing as well. Abigail will sing Tir na Nog from Into the West, which was directed by Mike Newell, and Nuala is singing Never Forget from Murder on the Orient Express, which was originally sung by Michelle Pfeiffer.”

Family connections are important to Doyle, who himself arrived in the middle of a family of 13 in Uddingston, whose sisters Ellen and Margaret are singers (the latter appearing on the soundtrack of the Newell film) and whose father was an opera-loving tenor who idolised John McCormack.

“But I was the only one of the family who studied music. I had started picking out tunes by ear on a glockenspiel as a kid and then my folks got me a piano.

“At Our Lady’s High School in Motherwell I had a very good music teacher, but she left for a promotion in my fifth year so there was no teacher to take me into my Highers. I was in a terrible state as there was nothing else that I was interested in.

“So four of us asked to go to Dalziel High School in Motherwell, where we had great teachers, and I sailed through the audition for the academy from there.” “The academy”, is of course, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and an institution that was pivotal in the making of Doyle’s multifaceted career.

Young Patrick had gone to the junior academy as a schoolboy who was playing in brass bands as well as studying piano. But he also remembers being aware of how music was used on screen from an early age.

“They used to call me square eyes in the house because I was never away from the television, but I was always studying the construct of it. I used to love watching Bilko [the American comedy series starring Phil Silvers] and was always aware of the music, as well as the other technical details of the way that the programme was made. I clocked all that stuff when I was young.

“But when I went to the academy it was to pursue music. I think I thought I’d probably end up teaching, and the idea of that was quite appealing. But I was very interested in the drama there as well, and my fellow student Morag

Composer Patrick Doyle, who says: ‘I am really proud to be doing this in Glasgow, I love the place and it was great to me.’ Above right: Brave to a job as musical director with his Renaissance Shakespeare company, with some stage roles as well, and a UK tour with a company that included Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi and Geraldine McEwan. When Branagh made his film of Henry V, Doyle wrote the music and when the movie opened in Los Angeles it was at the same time as the company were there on tour, so the Doyles settled in LA with their two young children – and a bank loan from Barclays – while he looked for more film-score work.

He has produced them at the rate of between one and three a year since, including during the period at the start of the millennium when he was being treated for leukaemia.

His most recent score is for another Branagh movie, the Shakespeare biopic All is True, in which the writer and director appears alongside Dame Judi and Sir Ian McKellen.

“I still write by hand initially,” says Doyle, “and for that I chose two Shakespeare texts and composed two songs at the piano that are the thematic foundation for the score. There is a