The Press and Journal (Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire)
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
Aberdeen-born author Andrew Scott talks to Jacqueline Wake Young about Oblivion’s Ghost, the third novel in his Willie Morton Scottish espionage series
“Oblivion’s Ghost is my 18th book and it’s a little bit different from the rest of my writing,” says Andrew. “I’ve been around a long time, it’s always been my intention to be a writer.
“I got a place in medical school but abandoned it to be a writer which meant I spent the next 15 years in squats writing novels believing I was going to be a huge overnight success.
“I was the man on the beach with a portable typewriter and I’ve had lots of highs and lows in my career.
“I’ve had novels published conventionally by Scottish publishers, but with the Willie Morton idea I decided to try to write in genre.
“I changed my name – my normal title is Andrew Murray Scott – so I made it shorter and more genre-friendly with Andrew Scott.
“It started as an experiment with Deadly Secrecy in February last year and I took it on a book tour around the north-east to some of my favourite bookshops up that way, like Yeadon’s in Banchory and The Bookmark in Grantown-on-Spey.
“I love these places, they’re great, they are filled with enthusiastic book sellers.
“Deadly Secrecy got good reviews and I wrote a second one in a very short period of time.
“I decided to call it a Scottish espionage series because a friend said I could maybe get in on the tartan noir ‘ bandwagon’ – but that’s already pretty heavily laden with writers!
“I decided no. I’m not going to do that, I’m going to create my sub-genre called Scottish espionage and plough ahead with this.
“I feel that it’s building and people are getting interested in Willie Morton. The best thing about writing a series is that you get space and time to develop your character and the networks and family that he belongs to.
“It is an area that the public are fascinated by – take the series Spooks for example.
“Yet there’s a lot of stuff that people are not aware of, for example, about MI5’s activities in Scotland. Not many people know that MI5 has an office in Glasgow.
“The main theme of the book is secrets, closed doors, private corridors.
“I have finished the first draft of the fourth one but I’m not bringing it out until next year.
“I have six years’ experience as a freelance journalist in the 1990s and Willie Morton is me on a very, very good day.
“He’s much younger than me, he’s a very likeable chap, he’s a kind of a new man, he’s not a macho guy, in contrast to most of the political thrillers that you see with MI5 and MI6.
“Willie Morton is far from that. He’s not a fearless, secret agent, he’s a journalist trying to get a story.”