The hero in my stories hunts fictional killers in the US. But it was real-life horror from my childhood that proved evil can exist closer to home
How true crimes influenced thriller writer
Mason Cross is the crime writer behind the Carter Blake thriller series.
Five successful books in, his hero has trailed killers all over the US, building sales and a stellar reputation.
Gavin Bell is from Cambuslang, near Glasgow, and is the man behind them both, writing the books under a pen name.
And the real-life crime which sparked his imagination happened closer to home, in fact almost on his doorstep.
The 39-year-old author was just three when taxi driver Catherine McChord was found murdered in her black cab in October 1982.
Her body was found in Braeside Place which backed on to where he grew up in Huntly Drive.
In December that year, the body of nurse Elizabeth Walton was discovered in the grounds of the primaryrimary school which Gavin would later attend.
Both were the victims off locallocalmanIainmanIain Scoular, who was caughtht in 1983 and sentenced to 20 years in prison, and Gavin has revisited the horrific crimes for a new CBS Reality series, Written n in Blood.
He said: “I had always ys thought about and known wn about this case from whenn I wa s g row i n g up in Cambuslang. I knew there ere had been a couple of murders ders when I was about three years ears old and, in fact, one off the bodies had been found literally erally behind my house.
” It wasn’t one of those things hings that was a constant topicpic of conversation or anythingng like that, probably because the murderer was caught which was obviously good. It was just something people knew about.
“I spoke to my dad about it and he remembered being woke up that night by all the f lashing blue lights over in Braeside Place. His bedroom was at the back of the house at that time. The next day the police came round to canvas and asked him if he had seen anything.
“It was something kids at school mentioned and walking round the neighbourhood you would hear things like ‘ That’s where the murderer lived’.
“Where I grew up in Huntly Drive, we used to cut through the hedge in my back
garden to go through Braeside Place all the time. The second victim got the last train home from Glasgow and walked up to Stewarton Drive and I’ve done that trip hundreds of times.
“It was something I was always just aware of but it wasn’t anything I really thought about before I started looking into it in more detail for the show but it does colour your view.
“Whenever anything l ike this happens, you hear the neighbours say ‘It was such a shock, you never expect anything like that to happening a place like this’.
“I guess the big thing is I never had that illusion that nothing bad can happen in a place. It can happen anywhere.
“You don’t know what your neighbour is thinking. It does make you think. Make sure you double-lock the doors, you never know who is out there.”
Written in Blood, which is on CBS Reality on Tuesday at 10pm, sees bestselling author Simon Toyne, who has penned the Sanctus and the Solomon Creed series, meet six of the world’s most popular crime fiction writers to discuss the influence true crime has had on their work. For Gavin, who still lives in Cambuslang with his wife and three children, it meant researching crimes he had grown up with but knew little about.
While the show’s researchers studied the case, he also went to Glasgow’s Mitchell Library where he discovered an investigation which had taken place in living memory but was rooted in a different century.
He said: “I was surprised by how little there was online about it. These days when you are used to social media and so many blogs and newspapers online but there was very little.
“Digging into it, going to the Mitchell Library and reading newspaper reports of the time, it was really startling how many important locations to the case were places I hung around as a kid and in fact still walk past today.
“But what really struck me was that it was such a different world, in terms of the media but also the way crimes were investigated. You didn’t have CCTV, you didn’t have internet, you couldn’t track everybody from where their phone had been.
“It was really old school. It is almost like Victorian times because it is such a different world.
“The format of the programme is that Simon doesn’t know anything about it and he turns up and says ‘ Tell me about the case’.
I showed him where the first victim was picked up by the killer, where the bodies where found, and I took him around Cambuslang and other places and explained the case to him.”
His research also uncovered the grim detail of the case, which underlines that this was not fiction but brutal, harsh reality as both suffered violent deaths.
He said: “When you grow up and you hear about it, you think of the abstract but when you look into the details and forensics of what actually happened, it’s horrendous. It really strikes you these are real people and terrible things happened to two innocent women who were just going about their business.”
Gavin’s debut Mason Cross novel, The Killing Season, was long-listed for the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Book of the Year 2015.
His second, The Samaritan, was selected as a Richard and Judy Book Club pick.
His latest book, Presumed Dead, was released earlier this year.
Investigating the tragic cases has made him aware they have affected him more than he realised.
He said: “I’m not a psychologist but I imagine growing up knowing bad things can happen where you live has probably had some effect on me.
“In the books I have written there is often that idea of evil hiding in plain sight. It does make you think.”
It really strikes you these are real people and terrible things happened to two innocent women