The serial killer who’d break in to a house and check the soap dish. If the underside of the soap was wet... he had to murder everyone inside To him, it all made perfect sense
...And other macabre inspirations that fuel the imagination of two-million bestselling tartan noir writer Stuart MacBride
FOR a man who makes a living writing about fictional serial killers, best-selling author Stuart MacBride admits he’s only managed to truly scare himself once. Out looking for his cat in the woods around his remote Aberdeenshire home, the beam of his head torch suddenly picked up two eyes glittering menacingly in the darkness and he remembers whispering to himself: ‘What are you? A badger? A fox?’
Softly, a little voice in his head replied: ‘No, I’m something much, much worse.’ It was enough to make him turn tail and hotfoot it back to the safety of his home, where he locked the door and put all the lights on.
Unsurprisingly, MacBride – considered one of Scotland’s leading ‘tartan noir’ authors alongside Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, with book sales topping 1.8 million – decided to use the eerie experience at the beginning of one of his crime thrillers.
The 53-year-old, who lives with his wife, Fiona, near Huntly, said: ‘I think that’s the only time I truly scared myself. Our cat has cataracts in one eye and it doesn’t reflect light, so I knew it wasn’t her staring back at me.’ He never found out what the creature actually was.
MacBride, a former project manager who has been writing since 2005, made his name with a string of novels set in and around Aberdeen, featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae, whose long-suffering partnership with his sidekick, Detective Inspector Roberta Steel, keeps readers entertained despite their gruesome discoveries. A second successful series of books, starring Detective Inspector Ash Henderson, based in the fictional town of Oldcastle, helped secure his position as a top crime writer and MacBride has won numerous awards.
NOW he is about to unveil a new female detective for his fans in his latest book, published later this month. Promising his usual dark, gritty style, No Less The Devil sees Det Sgt Lucy McVeigh on the trail of two killers. For MacBride, authenticity is everything and, as well as having spent significant periods of time on patrol with police officers, among the most thumbed books in his home are the FBI’s Crime Classification Manual, a go-to guide for investigating violent crimes, as well as the training manuals for the FBI academy at Quantico, in Virginia.
He adds: ‘They take you through step by step what happened and some of them are just absolutely horrible. If I’m honest, I’m not a big fan of true crime. I know some people love it, but fiction is fine for me because it’s all made up and nobody’s lost anyone in horrific circumstances.
‘I remember reading about one serial killer who would break into a house and check the soap in the soap dish. If it was wet on the underside, he had to kill everyone inside. It’s astonishingly terrible but in some way it made perfect sense to him.
‘For me, particularly with a serial killer character, the key has to be “does this make sense to them”, because it always has to.
‘As a species we are capable of the most horrific things as long as we can justify it to ourselves. People don’t wake up one morning and go “I quite fancy being a monster” or “I’ll kill a few people today, that’ll be fun”.
‘These things grow over years and years and that’s why I always try to keep in mind that, if this was me, is this the thing that would make sense for me to do? Is this logical? Does this fulfil a burning need that I have?
‘I don’t like serial killers who run around killing people in as elaborate a way as possible, with as much gore as you can possibly get. There is a real reason for this stuff and it makes monsters of normal people, which I think makes them more interesting and much scarier.
‘It has always fascinated me that your neighbour could have a collection of thumbs in a little box in his kitchen and you would never know until something goes wrong or he dies and they clear out his house.’
In No Less The Devil, his latest serial predator is the Bloodsmith, but MacBride claims he is not based on anyone in particular, just ‘another broken person, either by
genetics or circumstances, who is trying very hard to do what he thinks is right’.
Following his grim handiwork is Det Sgt McVeigh, a character MacBride introduced readers to – though many perhaps won’t realise it – several years ago in a short story for BBC Radio 4.
He said: ‘I really liked the character but it was her as a small child. It’s always been niggling away at me what she would be like when she grew up and if she would become a police officer.
‘No Less The Devil also explores themes of corruption and power and the way so much of our lives is controlled by people who come from a very small pool. Those two things sort of fused and that’s where the book came from.’ But he adds: ‘It’s a really difficult book to discuss without spoiling the ending.
‘I always think of myself as someone who writes for people who re-read books. Even if you get to a certain point in one of my books and think “What the hell is this? How is this happening?”, if you go back once you’ve finished, you will be able to see as you go through it that actually while you thought something was going on, something entirely different was happening to the way you perceived it.’ MacBride is about to embark on a UK tour, including London, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Perth for the first time since the pandemic began.
He laughs: ‘I’m hugely grateful to my readers for allowing me to struggle and swear and bang my head off the keyboard for ten hours a day. I’ve missed going on tour and speaking to them. If it wasn’t for them I’d still be working in IT.’
Away from writing, two of his proudest achievements have been winning Celebrity Mastermind in 2017, with a specialist subject on the life and works of Winnie-the-Pooh creator A. A. Milne, and coming first in the World Stovies Championship in 2014.
On the first, he says simply: ‘It was not an experience I enjoyed and I was incredulous when I won.
‘I don’t think anyone had less hope of me coming anything other than last. I got talked into it and didn’t want to do it. It’s like taking an oral exam live on television in front of the whole country and you know if you get anything wrong the BBC will put it together in a special bloopers reel.’
It is the second gong, however, which gives him the greatest pleasure as he recalls how his mouthwatering recipe of leg of lamb cooked ‘low and slow’ for up to seven hours on a bed of shredded onion wowed the judges.
He said: ‘By the end, it’s so delicious and moist you could carve it with a spoon. I don’t peel my tatties and I use two different kinds. The Maris Piper ones I scar on the outside, so the skin just breaks down, while the waxy ones are cut up so you get the texture of those cooked in lamb stock.
‘When all the tatties are about to break down and it’s just about ready, I add in the meat I took off earlier so it doesn’t overcook and is still moist. It’s lovely – and why I’m the shape I am.’
Unlike his contemporaries, Rankin and McDermid, who have both had their books successfully adapted for TV, MacBride thinks it unlikely any of his protagonists will appear on our screens any time soon, mainly because he continues to reject all sample scripts sent to him.
Back when he was writing his first novel, Cold Granite, he says he thought it would be fun to make his main character – in this case, Logan McRae – the ‘normal’ cop, and his sidekick, Det Insp Steel, the ‘weirdo’.
He adds: ‘Normally, it’s the other way round, so Inspector Morse has Lewis, Rebus has Siobhan, Sherlock Holmes has Watson.
‘When it comes to television, they can’t seem to accept that’s what makes the book work, that dynamic. So they make Logan very weird and he becomes like the normal protagonist of a TV show, and they play down all the other characters and everything is so out of character. If I meet someone I can trust and they stick to the plot, maybe it’s something I might consider, but I need to be wooed.
‘It would help if they had an actor on board of sufficient standing and who was invested in the books. There are characters in certain books where I think they look like certain people but I want Logan, while I write him, to live in my head. I want to keep my version, so I won’t let anyone near the rights.’
Sadly, fans are likely to have to wait another three years for his next Logan McRae novel, which he is planning to mark the 20th anniversary of his first publication.
In the meantime, during the lockdowns of the past two years he has spent his time writing two short novels that feature Det Insp Steel.
He said: ‘I was asking my wife, who helps me with my research and with proofreading, what I should write with this time on our hands and she said, “For God’s sake, whatever you do, don’t write a lockdown novel. People have had enough with the virus. Give us something escapist and fun.” So I did two fun crime novels, one of which I hope we can publish soon.’ One thing for sure is that is he is never in any danger of ever suffering writer’s block as he simply takes off – not for the nearest police station, but thelocal supermarket.
He says: ‘I walk up and down every single aisle, pottering away, regardless of whether or not I need anything there. As people come towards you, you hear snippets of conversation with no context whatsoever and it sparks little connections in my head.’
He adds with a laugh: ‘You then meet them coming the other way in the next aisle and I don’t always remember what they say word for word, but it just kicks off other things in my brain and by the time I get to the frozen food section, I have it. I think, “Ah, of course! Dismemberment!”
• No Less The Devil will be published by Penguin Random House on April 28.
It has always fascinated me that your neighbour could have a collection of thumbs in a little box