The Perfect Setting
Author Caro Ramsay on Scotland’s Tartan Noir scene
PAISLEY-BASED Caro Ramsay is a very busy woman. While one half of her week is spent working as an osteopath in west Scotland, the other half is spent creating gritty crime novels featuring the beloved detective duo Anderson and Costello.
This combination might sound a little unorthodox and rather challenging to most, but Caro – who releases her 13th book, The Silent Conversation, this month – disagrees.
“To be honest, my day job and my writing work aren’t actually that different,” she says.
“Any form of medical diagnosis is detection – my osteopathic job is like detection going forwards, while my writing is detection going backwards.
“You start at the end of a book and then work your way back to figure out how someone would go about carrying out that crime.”
Caro, who grew up in Govan, took up writing after an injury stopped her doing her regular work.
“I fractured my back and was in hospital for a long time. I’d like to tell you that I did it kayaking over the
Falls of Lora in Glen Etive or going up Ben Nevis, but the truth is I just tripped up the stairs.
“A friend of mine brought me a clipboard and a Papermate pen, because you can write lying down with those. I started writing about murdering everyone in the ward who was annoying me!”
Caro hadn’t written anything creatively since school, but this penchant for murder – thankfully just writing about it, not committing the act itself – seems to have started at rather a young age. “When I was about seven, we’d all been told to write a wee story around a famous nursery rhyme, so I chose The Teddy Bears’ Picnic. The first line of my story was, ‘Emma was the last one to die!’ In my version the teddy bears turned on the children and ate them.”
During her hospital stay, Caro wrote her first novel, Absolution. Published in 2007, it was shortlisted for the Crime Writer’s Association’s New Blood Dagger – awarded to the best debut of the year.
Since then, the author has written a string of novels featuring Anderson and Costello, including Singing To
“In my version the teddies ate the children”
The Dead, The Blood Of Crows and The Red, Red Snow – which was longlisted for Bloody Scotland’s Mcilvanney Prize last year.
This year saw Caro stepping away from Anderson and Costello with her first stand-alone novel, The Cursed Girls.
“I’d just finished writing The Red, Red Snow, which was my attempt at a locked-room mystery. I decided to challenge myself with an unreliable narrator story.”
The book tells the story of Megan Melvick, a deaf woman who has spent years avoiding her inheritance, the dark and disquieting family estate, Benbrae – now home only to her distant, aristocratic father and her sister Melissa, dying quietly in an upstairs bedroom.
Trapped behind her unreliable hearing aids and vulnerable to what others want her to see, Megan is unable to find answers – why is there a new woman on her father’s arm? And why has their absent mother not returned to say a final goodbye to Melissa?
“I always think a book has a flavour to it when I start writing,” Caro says. “I’m a wee bit lost until I find it.
“This book’s flavour is hot weather, a big house with dry rot, memories resurfacing of times that could have been lovely, but were in fact terrible.
“The book is about two girls with very different lives coming together. One of them is deaf and the other is from the wrong side of the tracks.”
On a trip to Morocco, Caro discovered a greater understanding of the world perceived by someone who has hearing difficulties – enough, she hoped, to use a deaf person’s narrative authentically.
“I walked the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco with a deaf man. I think I learned more about humanity in those 14 days than I have during the rest of my life.
“At one point we were walking on a very high and narrow path, which had a huge drop to one side. The person I was with asked me to walk in front of him – because if I fell behind him, he wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t hear me scream.
“Now when I’m out driving and I see somebody being a bit slow to respond, I always consider the fact
“That question of someone waving at you – are they waving drowning” or
that they could be deaf. It’s such an invisible thing.”
More standalone novels are brewing in the back of Caro’s mind, but fans of Anderson and Costello shouldn’t fear because there are more books to come, including the 13th, The Silent Conversation – out this month.
“The new novel is about a silent conversation going on across the backyard of a very glamorised tenement. An agoraphobic woman sees something out of her window and interprets it in a certain way, but when the police investigate, they stumble across something horrific.”
Caro tells me that a house she frequently walks past gave her the idea for her novel.
“An elderly person used to live in a house up the road. Every time I walked by with my dogs, I’d see this little face at the window – they’d wave and I’d always wave back.
“One day the person wasn’t there anymore and then, a few weeks after that, a for sale sign went up.
“That’s kind of where the idea for the book came from, that question of why is someone waving at you – and are they waving or drowning?”
The book is set in Glasgow, where Caro’s detectives Anderson and Costello are stationed. The Tartan Noir wave of crime novels set in Scotland appears to be expanding every year – is there something in the water?
Caro says, “Absolutely! Scotland is the perfect setting – a very adventurous and appealing place to write crime, and I think that’s the reason that so many of us are at it!”
The Silent Conversation, by Caro Ramsay, is published on September 30.
Caro Ramsay is a favourite guest speaker at the Scottish International Crime Writing Festival, Bloody Scotland, in Stirling. This year’s festival takes place across September 17-19, and the full line-up will be announced soon. www.bloodyscotland.com