BLOOD READ
A guide to 10 of the best killer crime novels.
GLASGOW-BORN IT high-flyer Bill Daly had always dreamed of penning at least one novel.
But the demands of his Paris-based job as IBM’S manager of manpower planning for Europe meant he never had the time.
It wasn’t until he retired to an idyllic hilltop home in the south of France that he was able to realise his dream.
A string of books later, and with Never Proven, the fourth in his Glasgow-based DCI Charlie Anderson crime series about to hit book shops, Bill is in reflective mood.
Now back in Glasgow after 20 years in Montferrier-sur-lez near Montpellier, the author tells in10: “My first novel was The Pheasant Plucker, a humorous spy spoof whose hero comes from Kilbirnie. I failed to find a publisher, so I self-published.
“The Professor of English at Montpellier happened to pick up a copy and was sufficiently impressed with the use of the English language and the fact that some of the action takes place in the French city. He made it a text book for students. It became a cult book and a best-seller locally.
“I didn’t do much for the next few years; when you’ve written one comedy you’ve used all your comic lines. Then I decided to write a Glasgow-based crime book featuring Detective Chief Inspector Charlie Anderson.
“While most fictional detectives have some sort of hang-up in their personal lives – they’re drinking too much, they’re having an affair, or their kids are on drugs – Charlie has none of those problems.
“But he is getting on a bit. He’s approaching retirement, doesn’t understand modern policing methods, still takes notes in shorthand and his arthritis is giving him gyp – but he gets results.”
Bill decided to pitch his idea to Ben Yard-buller of Old Street Publishing.
“It happened they had discussed getting into Tartan Noir when my book Black Mail landed on his desk,” says Bill. “He asked what my writing plans were and I was taken aback because I didn’t have any.
“So I busked it and said I was looking at a series about this detective who in the first book was about to take early retirement.
“He said ‘your lead character is taking early retirement in the first book; are you sure you have thought this through?’
“I said ‘you are thinking of commissioning somebody who is pushing 70...are you sure YOU have thought this through?’ We got off on a good foot.”
The book, published in 2014, went to No 1 in the Amazon electronic charts for Scottish crime. Double Mortice was published in 2015 and Cutting Edge the year after.
Bill, who was awarded the Constable Trophy for crime-writing by the Scottish Association of Authors that same year and who has appeared at both Glasgow’s Aye Write festival and the Bloody Scotland crime festival in Stirling, says: “I was writing in my study overlooking pine forests and a swimming pool.
“An author writing for a living has to have very strict discipline and sit down from nine to five to work.
“If you’re doing it as a hobby because you have already retired and you’re not depending on the income from it you can be much more flexible and write when the mood takes you.
“Before I start my books I have already worked out the crime, who did it and the denouement. Plot is the main thing. It has to have a satisfying end.”
Never Proven is born out of Scotland’s unique legal system. “Scotland is the only country in the world that has three possible verdicts, guilty, not guilty and not proven.
“In Never Proven a body is found outside a pub in Glasgow. It’s a guy who got off on a not proven verdict a couple of years previously, and there are lots of people who have a potential reason for wanting to have a go at him.
“Glasgow is a great venue for authenticity. It was the crime capital of Europe in 2006. It’s improved a lot in the last 12 years.”
He chuckles at the suggestion his beloved home town has been the catalyst for a new career as a novelist.
“It keeps me out of the pub,” he says with a modest grin, then laughs: “or gets me into it – for research. I call it research, my wife calls it a pub crawl.”
And what are his current writing plans? “I don’t have any ideas at the moment,” he confesses.
in10 has a feeling he is about to “busk it” again – watch this space.