Grisly deaths brought to life... by Winnie the Pooh expert
GENIAL AND witty, Stuart MacBride does not initially appear the type of man who would make his living writing about grisly murders, rotting bodies and smoked corpses.
“It is in my imagination,” the Scottish author explains brightly. “But what I’m trying to do is put you in the head of your character. So if Callum [the detective in his latest novel] sees something, you get to experience it with him.
“These are intense emotional experiences for the people who have to deal with these things, and I want you to be there and understand what it’s like to be them.”
The award-winning writer, whose last six novels have gone straight to number one in the book charts and is best known for his series featuring laconic detective Logan McRae, is due to appear at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival this summer.
He will appear alongside fellow Scottish author Peter May at The Old Swan Hotel on July 22.
But before his arrival in Yorkshire, the author has a new book to discuss.
MacBride may pen gritty crime stories but he recently won
thanks in part to his rather softer specialist subject – the life and works of AA Milne. was the first book I can remember reading – that’s the book that I carry at the very heart of me.”
He may be an authority on the famous bear, but MacBride, 48, also has extensive knowledge of crime, thanks to his meticulous research into the genre since his first thriller,
was published in 2005. He’s since written 10 more in the Logan McRae series and a handful of other fictional tales.
His gripping stories are set in Scotland, featuring a diverse mix of coppers who deal with a variety of murders, using dark humour to cope with the harrowing scenes they encounter. The latest,
centres on Police Scotland’s ‘Misfit Mob’, the unit where they dump officers they can’t get rid of and give them impossible cases.
One of these misfits, DC Callum MacGregor, is asked to investigate the discovery of a seemingly ancient mummy in a rubbish dump, but when recent dental work is found during the post-mortem, MacGregor and his colleagues find themselves on the hunt of a killer who likes ‘smoking’ his victims and giving them a god-like status in death.
MacBride, who lives in Aberdeen, found the inspiration for the novel on his doorstep. “I was at the museum there and they have a Peruvian mummy in a big glass bell jar hidden behind a curtain. It comes from an area of Peru where these people are venerated as gods and are there to protect the village. The feeling that I was not actually looking at a Peruvian mummy but at a Peruvian god, squirrelled away in a little museum in the North East coast of Scotland, got to me.”
Some have suggested that MacBride goes too far in his gruesome descriptions – the scenes where a potential victim is ‘smoked’ by the killer are pretty disturbing – but he insists he only includes them if they are valid for the story.
“I aim to write things that demonstrate what it’s like to be in those situations. It’s remarkable just how magnificent the sense of humour is of police officers, hearing some of the things they have to deal with on a daily basis, which are genuinely shocking.”
His huge writing schedule – he is already working on the next novel – has meant he hasn’t had a holiday for five years. And, despite his success in the crime genre, there are still some dreams he’d love to tick off – like writing a children’s book. “I’d love to produce a book that is somebody’s book for life,” MacBride muses. “In the same way that I carry