AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Celebrated novelist Marion Todd tells Rebecca Baird about her ‘weird’ writing process ahead of latest DI Clare Mackay release

Crime readers are notoriously voracious, and Fife writer Marion Todd knows how to keep her fans well-fed. Her new novel, A Blind Eye, is the latest instalment of her DI Clare Mackay series and her seventh published book in less than four years.

And although her fans’ hunger for more stories helps keep her writing at pace, it’s her own love for protagonist Clare that drives her.

“There’s a lot of me in Clare,” reveals former college lecturer Marion, 61. “And she’s all the things I would love to be and things I’m not. She’s taller than me, slimmer than me – she’s very fit, she runs quite fast!

“She’s quite disorganised, which I am as well. But I just really like her.”

In this novel, Clare investigates the murder of a solicitor found dead in his car – an upstanding family man who wasn’t quite what he seemed.

For Marion, fodder for such stories has come from her wide range of experiences, which included a summer job packing free gifts into magazines for DC Thomson in 1979, and a stint as a candle-maker.

“I used to be many things!” says Marion cheerfully, wrapping her fingers round her mug. We meet on a drizzly Dundee day, but she’s sporting a bright green scarf that brings out her ever-observant eyes.

“A piano teacher, college lecturer, candle-maker, plant-grower – I should settle on something, really, shouldn’t I?” she laughs, holding up her notebook. “This is it! I’m not doing anything else!”

One of her most memorable jobs, she tells me, was as a lounge pianist in Dundee’s old Swallow Hotel, now the Landmark.

“That was just such fun!” she recalls. “I saw an advert in the paper, and I thought: ‘I’ll have a go.’

“I used to sit there and, because I’d played for so long, I didn’t need music, so I’d just watch people.”

Over that time, Marion watched through a fug of smoke as football teams gave one another pre-game pep talks, countless wedding guests drunkenly stumbled through the awkward post-dinner, pre-dancing shuffle, and the good people of Dundee went about their bad business.

“You’d see people coming in and you just knew they weren’t with their husband or wife, they were with someone else,” Marion says, eyebrows shooting up.

“And sometimes you’d see the same person with several different people!”

Little did she know at the time that her meanderings were helping her build up a repertoire of shady characters, which she’d employ when she turned to crime writing after being inspired by favourite novelist Kate Atkinson.

Now a seasoned pro, she’s got her own writing process down to a T.

“First of all, I plan – very, very carefully,” explains Marion. “I’ll probably spend a couple of months planning a book before I even write a word.

“I plan on PowerPoint. I don’t know anybody else who does that, but it works for me,” she continues.

“So I take one slide per scene and at the top of the slide it’ll be the time, so ‘Thursday morning’ or something like that. And then there’ll be a few sentences that say what the plot is.

“There’s a lot of dragging the slides around. And eventually, when it’s in the right place, that’s my plan.

“It’s like the old-fashioned sticky notes on the wall method. But I like it on a screen!”

However, a sure-footed planning process doesn’t mean writing police procedurals is always a simple task. Night owl Marion still finds herself in knots as she writes away her evenings, with timelines not always adding up, or plot holes coming to the fore.

Her biggest lesson, however, is to always know exactly who the killer is from the get-go.

“I once made a huge, catastrophic mistake of changing the killer,” she admits. “But it had to happen because it was wrong from the start. I had wanted to run with the idea, then I got 40,000 words in and I thought: ‘I better fix it now.’ It was an absolute mess!”

But she’s a writer who goes the extra mile to ensure her readers get the best she can give – even resorting to unconventional pin-ups for inspiration.

“One of the books, I think it was the fifth one, had a male victim who was 40, and three of his friends were celebrating with him,” she recalls.

“I couldn’t distinguish between the three. So I Googled ‘male actors in their 40s’ and I found three that were different enough to spark my interest.

“I printed them out and put them up on my wall, and when I had to write a line for one of them, I was looking at them, thinking of what they might be like.”

Currently contracted to write nine DI Clare Mackay books, Marion is already almost finished drafting book eight. Asked whether she’d like to continue past the ninth one, she takes a moment to ponder.

“As long as I’m not writing the same book every time, I think I’d keep going,” she says. “I like a good crime to explore!”

Marion Todd will release A Blind Eye on June 8.