The Mother of All Books...

By Russel D McLean

It's a strange feeling to see something you've worked on for so long finally take on physical form. Technically speaking, this is around the 8th time (counting various editions) that I've held a book of mine in my hands, and every time it feels oddly unreal. The same panic sets in, that there's something in those pages I overlooked or that I'll suddenly be found out as a fraud of some kind.

But at the same time, there's a magical moment. One where I realise what all the hard work was about. There's a moment where - and those who know me will know how rare this is - I actually get an ego trip.

Looking at the book, I remember when there was no book, just a gem of an idea. Something itching to find release. I remember when I thought I would never finish. The moments where I thought that maybe this time I'd truly messed up, that I'd never be able to create something coherent. But it happened. I know this not just because there's a book in my hand but because the guts of that book - the words, the pages - passed through so many others before this thing was created. It passed editors, copy editors, agents. It became something that talked to other people. Even in a small way.

Mothers of the Disappeared is, I hope, my best book yet. I sincerely hope so because it was a book I'd been wanting to write for a long time. The gem of the book was generated back when I was writing shorts about Sam Bryson for AHMM. I always wanted Bryson to try and prove the innocence of someone no one else would ever believe was not guilty. I wanted him to have to face his own prejudices in dealing with someone who appeared absolutely guilty and repellant. And with Mothers of the Disappeared, I took this idea and ran with it. The book became bigger than that, of course, and while that basic seed is still there, it has become a very different beast. But I'm proud of it. Very proud. As I am of all my books, even the ones I think have flaws.

The book is offically released in the UK on April 30. I'll be launching it at Blackfriars in Glasgow on the 28th (advance copies will be there for purchase!) at 7pm. I look forward to seeing people read the book, to talking to them about it, to being able to finally see the fourth McNee novel out there in the wild. It was - for many thematic reasons - a tough book to write. But I'm proud of it. And all I can hope is that you will enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

And so the end is near...

By Russel D McLean

As I write this, I am finishing up the latest draft of CRY UNCLE, the last McNee novel. The draft is due to submitted just before MOTHERS OF THE DISAPPEARED  comes out in April. I feel a little odd about this one. Its the fifth McNee and I always said that I had a five book plan. One I've almost stuck to. So this, in a way, is the end.

Its not necessarily the very end. But its the end of the particular arc I wanted to write. It ties up a lot of loose ends. It brings a kind of emotional closure to certain aspects of the series. And of course it does open up the possibilities for new paths to be followed. If people want it, there may be room for more in the series. I just don't know how they would look. Yet.

To tell the kind of story I wanted to tell took a lot of ambition for someone who's not as concerned with plots as he is style. I always wanted the writing and the emotion to win out over any kind of whodunnit chicanery or clever-clever reveals. I never minded if people saw the twists coming but I did want them to be interested in the characters and where they were going. McNee has changed as the books have gone on. By the end of book 3, he had come to terms with his part in the death of his fiancee. He had started to quell the anger that he had felt for years. In fact, without giving too much away, the point of book 3 was to show that with a very specific kind of emotional switch that happened in the final act as McNee saw someone else go through the kind of anger he had experienced and realised how destructive that could be to someone.*

Book 4 therefore should start with McNee in a good place. But having had him come through that, I didn't think it was fair that he should have an easy time of it. And besides there were, as someone pointed out, still a few loose ends dangling from as far back as THE GOOD SON. When were they going to bite him on the arse?

They do. Right at the start of MOTHERS, a very bad decision we saw McNee make several years ago is rearing its head. Consequences are finally asserting themselves. He  has started to forgive himself. But can others forgive him?

We also explore a little more the time before he left the force. The book is very much about McNee's past both in the chronology of the books and his past as a cop. We learn that before he left the force he was involved in a very high profile investigation along with his now dead mentor, Ernie Bright. But while that case was close, it looks like the wrong man may have been arrested. The wrong who pleaded guilty. I've always been fascinated by the idea of miscarriages of justice, and the idea that an innocent person might have reasons for pleading guilty. So this book looks into that.  Not in a legal sense. I've never been one for that although I do think that this book might actually have more research than some of the others have when it comes to procedure. Its all about emotional consequences, however. And on that level I think it works very well.

McNee still has some very dark places to go. But I'm so very pleased that both Five Leaves and now Severn Publishing have given me the chance to write the books I wanted to write. Of course the series looks different in some ways from how I imagined it back at the start. But the thrust of that five book arc remains the same and I'm very glad to have done what I set out to do. You may be just about to enjoy book 4, but for me, book 5 is nearly complete and that brings with it a kind of beautiful bitter sweet feeling.

This may not be goodbye for McNee. But for me, it marks a kind of ending. One that makes me both smile and feel a tiny bit wisftul.

*I make no claims that I succeeded in doing this, but that was the intention

Outstaying Your Welcom

By Russel D McLean

I’ve often talked about how, in a perfect world, I’m bringing the J McNee novels to a close after five books.

Why?

All good things should come to an end, and I’ve never been a fans of series that outstayed their welcome. What’s got me thinking about it recently has of course been the return to UK screens of 90s sitcom, Red Dwarf. I loved Red Dwarf for six series and then it vanished. For three years it was off our screen and then it returned. And something was missing. The jokes. The humour. The characters. I could never point to what it was explicitly, but something felt off from the delayed seventh season and the show never quite recovered*.

It happens a lot with long running series. Unless the series attempts to evolve like say, Doctor Who, a show that truly changed with the times right down to rewriting the central character on several occasions, then a staleness can settle in after a while. Its known as “jumping the shark”, a phrase that entered popular culture when Happy Days suddenly became irrelevant to its audience after a strained episode where Fonzie, literally, jumped over a shark.

The point is that some series can run on beyond the point of their own relevance. And its often because an audience or readership demands that the series stay, but the creative spark has been extinguished or else has burned to almost nothing. It doesn’t happen in TV shows, but also in novels. Some long running series characters encounter the problem of stories that no longer feel relevant or characters who no longer have anything to say. Yet readers demand the return of these characters.

Its one of the reasons I admire George Pelecanos. He writes about the same characters for two, three or four novels, and then lets it go. He allows his characters to sya what they have to say and then moves on. Its admirable. And its the reason his writing is so powerful.

Coming back to TV, I love seeing TV shows with a gameplan. The Wire may have warranted a sixth series, but I’m glad it never got one. Babylon 5 completed its five year plan, and then fell apart completely when it tried to expand its own universe. Life on Mars never needed any expansion beyond two series because, frankly, it said everything relevant to itself in twelve episodes (Yes, I know about Ashes to Ashes, but that was an entirely different show in many ways). All of these shows set out too say something, said it and then (in general and discounting spin offs) got the hell out. Part of their appeal was that they stayed around as long as they needed to. But then you look at a TV show like The X Files; a show that outstayed its welcome by several years. It never reached a real climax, but it was soon apparent that it was lost for new and refreshing ideas, falling back on recycled ideas and falling behind the very TV shows that its helped to influence. And the less said about a TV show like Lost, that tried to keep itself going for as long as possible with no real game plan (you can’t tell me they knew where they were going; none of the plot holds up as having been planned from the start) the better.

Sometimes, its worth getting out before an idea gets too old, before a series loses itself in the race to remain on the go. With McNee, I only want to write about this character as long as I have something relevant to say with him, as long as I can allow him and the supporting cast to continue changing (albeit iin some ways subtly) from book to book. And even if I decide I have more to say about book 5, there is a game plan and certain elements that have been building since THE GOOD SON are going to be wrapped up by book 5 in a very definitive way.

I’d rather be The Wire than The X Files. I’d even rather be DeadWood - a show cancelled before it could say all it had to, but that left on a real high note before it lost the lustre of its early promise - than continue to expand an idea long past its sell by date, Or maybe I can create a property like Doctor Who; a series that manages to reinvent itself as something completely different every few years, that pre-empts the need to end by changing itself with the times and with the needs of its audience. But such an invention is rare, tough to craft and tougher to maintain. In general, the best rule is to let go of a character when the time comes naturally, rather than expand and continue past the point of no return.

*although to be fair, it seems to have regained a little something with the new series, perhaps through lessons learned from what went before - - maybe because the long, long rest (and the near disaster of its last attempted ressurection) has allowed the creators to rediscover something of what they had before.

Its all relative...

By Russel D McLean

Its not spoiling anything about my novels to say my protagonist, J McNee, has killed a man. After all, the first book opens with a line that tells us as much.

But McNee has his reasons for doing so. Whether or not you agree with his actions, he is justified within his own mind as to what he did. I'm not sure even I agree with him entirely, but then that's not my job as an author.

Too many crime novelists inject a kind of judgement on their characters. The authorial voice present within the novel judges and condemns certain actions, layers a certain morality on top of the work that more often than not is of a very traditional kind.

But one of the joys of crime fiction is that it allows us to ask questions. Moral questions. Ethical questions. Questions of relativity. And while it is tempting to raise these questions in order to answer them, I think that its a poor novelist who does so absolutely. After all, fiction is a conversation between the work and the reader, and while the author may have certain goals in mind, if they start whacking the reader over the head with their own assumptions it weakens the novel.

That's not to say that its easy to allow your characters to develop their own moral compass. In early drafts of THE GOOD SON, McNee was far more liberal than he is in the final drafts. In fact he went so far as to refuse to carry a gun when one was offered to him. He rose above the level of the men he was going up against and went to that fatal confrontation unarmed.

Until one of my early readers pointed out that McNee was bringing "a cricket bat to a gun fight" and that McNee would be dead within a moment.

So how to get round it?

The answer was easy: stop imposing my own morality on McNee. After all, I would not carry a gun. Yes, I have fired a gun before, but I remain in favour of strict gun control.

And McNee might feel the same on one level, but on another it made sense for him to accept the gun and take it to this confrontation. And, in the end, to use it.

It opened up a whole side to the character I had never seen before. It made him more complex. More importantly, it made the narrative more complete in terms of morality, because McNee's actions were no longer simply moral in the traditional sense, but were situationally so. He made a decision that may have been best for getting him out of one situation, but which would bring more complexity to his life and his own conscience.

Morality in crime fiction novels is up for debate. What is the right thing to do in a situation that is utterly removed from the everyday? Will your decisions have unforseen consequences? How do you live with those decisions?

I don't like to offer answers in my fiction, or to impose any sense of my own judgements onto my narrative. I have my own personal ones, but I like to use characters to explore issues of moral relativity. To show how morality and ethical behaviour can be fluid within people, can be truly situational. This is easier to do when you have a protagonist who is not in a position of moral authority (such as an appointed investigator or policeman) but someone who can act outside of protocols and ideals of others, who can form their own morality and whose behaviour can be fluidly affected by the situations in which they find themselves.

McNee does not reflect my own morality. But he helps me to explore it. I would no longer impose my own sense of ethics upon him. Because to do so would be cheating. But he helps me to see other points of view, to understand another way of seeing the world. This is something that I think all fictional characters do to a degree, to both readers and writers. To read or write about a character is not to read or write about ourselves, but to see how others act and react, to try and understand them. Of course, fiction should be entertaining as well, but entertainment also allows us to gain new perspectives on the world in ways we might not even always consciously realise.

Preview: FATHER CONFESSOR

By Russel D McLean

I'm redrafting folks, going through copy edits on FATHER CONFESSOR which, you know. is released in the UK this September. I know you're as excited as I am about this book, so you're going to want to pre-order from your preferred retailer.

So in lieu of actual content I present a little rough cut sneak preview of the opening page of FATHER CONFESSOR. Those of you who know the series will know that I start every book with a little teaser, and this book's no different.

So here, for the first time (since I read an early draft of this last year at Blackwell's bookshop), is a brief excerpt from book number the third:

I wasn't there.
    If I had been, things might have turned out different.
    I’d like to believe that.
    Some would argue, of course, that I’d only have fucked things up.
    For months afterward, I would spend  the hours past midnight – the hours when I couldn't sleep, when the guilt of the past always seemed at its strongest and when I felt at my most powerless and insignificant – thinking about what had happened that evening.
    Seeing events through his eyes.
    Trying to imagine what it must have been like. Trying to think about the chain of events that ended in a moment of blood and fear and pain.
    As I tried to imagine how he felt, my heart would pound as his must have. A surge of adrenaline. An expectation.
    He must have known that he was going to die.
    One way or the other. He must have known how things would end.
    Maybe he had come to terms with that idea.
    Looking back over his last few months, talking to friends and colleagues, I think they all knew that something was wrong with him. They had sensed his growing unease. They had noticed that he was more tense than usual. Most put this down to pre-retirement nerves. After all, he was due to quit the force in the next year. And like any good copper, he had a lot of unfinished business.
    So I can imagine how he felt that night.
    Walking into the warehouse, he might have called out. Perhaps listened to the echo of his own voice, heard it come back to him. A ghost-like echo. As though he was already dead. His own footsteps – polished shoes striking hard concrete – would have bounced and echoed around the wide space and made it appear as though there were others walking alongside him.
    Those for whom he was responsible.
    Maybe he was thinking about why he was here. The reasons he was alone in this warehouse, meeting a man he must have known could kill him.
    He would be thinking about his career. And his daughter.
    His daughter who was under investigation for possible criminal conspiracy. His daughter who had always been the centre of his world, who had idolised her father so much she followed him into the force.
    I would wonder what he was thinking.
    How he felt.
    And I could never know for sure. But I had to pretend, to try and gain some insight the hard facts could never uncover.
    I do know that he took the stairs to the mezzanine slowly. His shoes clanking off the metal grille, his hand running up the banister. A feather touch. More for reassurance than balance.
    But then, maybe his grip was tighter than usual. He was afraid of falling away. Of losing his grip.
    Maybe he came knowing that he faced death.
    He would do that on his own terms.
    The idea makes me feel better in a way.
    There had been no signs of a struggle when the coppers arrived on the scene. He did not fight back. He did not try to run.
    On the metal walkway high above the main floor, he would have been confronted by the man with the shotgun.
    Did they speak?
    Did he understand why the man was there to kill him?
     I don't know. I wasn't there.
    And I wish I had been.
    Some nights I wish it had been me and not him.
    The impact of the shot knocked him over the safety rails. Did he have time to register what was happening?
    Did he say a prayer as he fell?
    I wonder about his final thoughts. What he saw. What was revealed to him as he lay crooked on the floor of the abandoned mill, his blood pooling around his hand, his limbs twisted.
    Did he think of his killer?
    Of his daughter?
    I would have been the furthest thing from his mind. But if he felt a small twinge of disappointment, perhaps he was remembering me and the last time we spoke, the things I said to him.
    But I don’t know any of that.
    I just believe that I could sleep easier if I knew what he was really thinking in those last moments.

The Lost Sister

By Jay Stringer

Russel's second McNee book, The Lost Sister, hits shelves in the U.S. today. I was going to sit and write about why you should be picking up his books about a grumpy scottish detective, but then I realised I'd already done it. So I took a look back and realised that I couldn't say it any better than I did at the time. George Lucas tried to tell me to edit the whole thing and add in some comedy CGI. I tweaked a few things here and there, but this is pretty much intact.

Next week i'll be making it a trilogy of reviews, with a look at California by Ray Banks.

***

“I could kill him. It would be easy.”

Those are the opening lines from THE GOOD SON, the first McNee book. As opening lines go, I’d say It's pretty much up there. Grabs you straight by the throat and asks you, through gritted teeth, 'you got a problem?'

Something I noticed early on about Russel is that he has a touch of the Lawrence Block and John Mcfet about him; his pages are so easy to read that you stop noticing that you’re doing it. You know what I mean; some books you’re checking your watch every other paragraph, or scratching your bum, or thinking of that kettle you just boiled. But with writers like these, you don’t notice the things going on around you. Reading one line is an unspoken commitment that you’re going to read the first ten chapters. Then, well, why stop there?

The other thing is that he doesn’t get caught up in what he’s writing. There’s no self conscious awkwardness of trying to bend his hometown or its people to fit into genre conventions. There’s no knowing pause as it becomes clear that this is a PI story set in Scotland, no first date fumbling on the doorstep.

He. Just. Gets.On.With.It.

And it’s suprising how many authors don’t do that. Many like to pause, to dawdle, or to let the reader know that they’re aware of the trappings and flaws of whatever style of story they’re writing. No, just sit and get on with telling the story.

The first book centres around our protagonist, J Mcnee. He’s a moody and isolated Dundonian PI. He has anger issues and a good way with wit. He has some of the key ingredients of being a PI; he manages to say just enough to get himself smacked around or shot at, but not so much that we get to figure him out. At the same time, he’s not just a standard driven detective type. Many of his flaws are more to do with the modern British male than any genre cliché; yes he’s alienated and rebellious, but a lot of it seems to draw from a simple social awkwardness. He’s not the tortured soul of Hamlet or Bruce Wayne, and he’s not the drunken philosopher of Marlowe or Scudder. Much more than that, he seems to simply be a modern man who’s not always sure of how to behave around others.

Even his nickname in the book helps to conjure up a play on the ideas of masculinity and manners. He is called Steed after the character played by Patrick Macnee in The Avengers. The image that evokes for most is of a deliberately overdone gentlemen, the hat, the umbrella, the manners and the heart of steel. There was an earlier version of Steed, in the shows first season; a shadowy figure, untrusted and lonely. Where was I going with this…..

Anyway, back to McNee.

There is still an element of tragedy that drives McNee, and it’s at the core of what works with this book. It’s a story about grief. Be it McNee trying to come to terms with loss, or a farmer trying to deal with his brothers apparent suicide. The book shows that grief is a far more complicated and damaging thing than any level of violence.

Russel’s second book, THE LOST SISTER, was released in the UK last year. It's opening feels almost low-key compared to the first;

“He doesn’t waste a moment. Lets go of the axe….”

The first book starts with a gun, and the impending gunshot. An instant explosive kick start to a story. The second starts with violence, but one of a more personal, brutal, and confident manner. This is a writer stepping it up and taking full control of his characters and world. I’ve mentioned before how impressed I was with the handling of violence in this second book, the control that Russel demonstrated in knowing what not to show, and in knowing that he could make it work. There is some truly brutal stuff in the novel, but Russel chooses to focus on the aftermath of violence rather than the instant impact. It's a choice that gives the violence more weight, and makes you feel it more even if you don't see it happen.

The second book sort of does what it says on the cover in many ways. There is a sister. She is lost. But that’s just scratching the surface. It looks at thorny issues of love, trust and domestic violence. And it took me by surprise a number of times, I love it when a book genuinely doesn’t go the way you think it will. There are twists and turns to the relationships, and nobody ends the story in remotely the same emotional state that they started it. Somehow, it felt like The Empire Strikes Back, with its revelations and emotional betrayals. I can’t wait to see where the characters go from here.

Passing The Torch

By Russel D McLean

In 2004, my first professionally published short story appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. It’s a story that still makes me proud. One scene in particular, set in a nightclub (loosely based on the downstairs at the Student’s Union) still feels very real to me when I look back over it.

It was the beginning of what could be loosely termed a “series” of short stories centred around Private Investigator Sam Bryson. Sam was a man with his own morals that set him apart from the police force on which he had once served. He left in circumstances that were never fully explained and still had a contact on the force in the form of Sandy Griggs, a copper with a strange past whose own experience with domestic abuse as a child made him very hard on a particular type of criminal. Sam’s centre in life was his girlfriend, Ros, a philosophy lecturer at the university who hailed from the US. Ros covered two bases as a character – one, she maintained Bryson’s moral centre and, two, she explained why he had a more American idiom to the way he spoke than most other characters. This was my insurance since at the time I was reading so much US crime fic that the slang and speech patterns had started to bleed over into my own writing.

Somewhere around 2006 I got my first agent.

I said I wanted to write a novel with Sam at the centre.

They said: “Give us someone new. Not someone with all this backstory.”

If I’m honest, this response irritated me. I didn’t see why they wanted me to drop this character who many readers had received well. I liked him. I liked him a lot.

So what was my response?

You want a character who has to build his life, I’ll give you him.

So I stripped Sam of his name. And all his support network. Took away everything he had earned and looked at what was left.

He became McNee*. A man with no first name. So I took that away from him. I took away his support in the force, making him an outcast (by choice, you could say) and then I took away his support in the real world by killing off the love of his life.

What emerged came from the same basic archetype as Bryson but was darker, harder and I think more believable. His reasons for leaving the force suddenly became concrete. His antipathy towards his former colleagues was understandable given the new circumstances in which this archetype found himself.

And then my agent and I parted company.

I didn’t know what to do. But I had this character and this manuscript. And I liked them. If I was honest, I had grown to love McNee more than I had Bryson because McNee’s pain felt more honest and real to me than Bryson’s ever had.

But still the idea of Bryson lingered at the back of my mind. I was still writing short stories about him, and figured that I had to pass the torch somehow. I did this as indirectly as possible, with McNee having “blink and you’ll miss it” cameo in one of the last Bryson stories published, and a few hints about “the other guy” who used to work out of McNee’s offices in the first few chapters of THE GOOD SON.

I admit I’ve always wanted to explore more in-depth what happened to Bryson, what soured him on the PI gig, made him leave. I always had an end point in mind, after all. I always do. After all, regular readers of this blog will know how I feel about series.

And maybe one day I will tell that story. But until then, despite my initial misgivings I’m glad to have got to know McNee over the course of what is now two novels. In my mind, he is the more realistic of the pair, the more believable, and probably the more noir as well. There is something about him that is, I think, genuinely human.

But, of course, my American friends – many of whom will already know Sam Bryson, especially if they subscribe to the wondrous Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine – now have the chance to judge the new boy as THE GOOD SON hits their shores this week. He’s already had Sam’s approval. I hope he’ll have yours.


*For the first draft, his name was McRae until I realised that fellow Scot and bearded God Stuart MacBride had already taken this name for his protagonist.

No sleuths please, we're British.

By Jay Stringer

We all know the tradition on the PI in fiction.
Even the mention of it evokes certain images. Mean streets and trench coats, strange camera angles and seedy Motels. Maybe it evokes New York hotels with introspective alcoholics, crazy Colombians and Irish gangsters. One of the most lingering images for me is of a beach trailer and a gold car, and in the last few years it’s begun to conjure up poetry and whiskey in a rain soaked Galway.

Okay, maybe none of those things. There are a number of writers doing interesting things with the PI at the moment, and some of them are on this very website. But what I’m getting at is that all of the images that spring to mind when you mention the phrase “Private Eye” seem inextricably linked with America. And, thanks to writers like Bruen and Hughes, Ireland. I’ll take that a step further, and say that the images that spring to mind are “anything but British.”

British crime fiction gave the world Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple. And the grail myth, the themes that Chandler was so obsessed with, took form over here. Yet, when Chandler wrote his famous line that Hammett took crime “out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley,” he was complaining about the disconnect between the cozy English mystery and the realities of crime.

So what happened? It’s not as if we’re short on mean streets. From the places the tourists visit, like London and Glasgow, to the modern reality of cities like Birmingham, Newcastle and Liverpool. There’s plenty of material there. In fact, if you look at the issues that modern Britain is facing -unemployment, recession, racism, immigration, knife crime- you’d think it would be the perfect setting for some classic PI fiction. And it’s only through the work of some great Irish writers that the genre now seems so natural over there.

So is there something else at play? Is there something unique to Britain that also makes it difficult to write a Marlowe, a Scudder or even a Rockford? Well that’s enough of me. I sat down to talk with a couple of people who know what they’re doing, and who know the subject inside and out.

Ray Banks has written four novels that focus on the some-time PI, Callum Innes. Innes is a very British character, full of both love and contempt for himself, and his stories found a middle ground between the social issues of modern Manchester and the themes of classic hardboiled fiction. The fourth and final Cal Innes books was released this year. It’s called Beast Of Burden, and can be found here. The first book, Saturday's Child, is here and here. I'd also recommend you head over to Ray's website where there are links to the short stories that first started Cal off, I'm partial to The Monkey Man.

Our very own Russel D McLean writes about death and deceit in the great cold north. Or Dundee, to be precise. His character, J McNee manages to be cut from both the classic PI mold and a very Scottish cloth. (Don’t mention heather or kilts, though, whatever you do.) His first novel, The Good Son, dealt with issues I wrote about last week; grief and guilt. And he finds a way to make the PI work. His second McNee book, The Lost Sister, is released this week.
I’m officially putting all of these books on the dosomedamage syllabus. There will be a test. But right now, I hear you, lets get on with the show…..


JS: What are your thoughts on how a PI fits into British crime fiction? Do you think he serves a different function than the American character?

RB: Honestly? I don't think the PI fits within a British tradition any more than a lone gunslinger does. They're both quintessentially American character types, and don’t work naturally in a British setting. I’ve always thought that character was supposed to spring naturally from its environment, and a British background doesn’t naturally provide the same circumstances in which a PI would thrive. The US, after all, is a country founded on the principles of questioning establishment. Conversely, Britain – and England in particular – has a long history of establishment rule, whether that be government or monarchy. As such I think there’s still an underlying belief in that rule, which is why our protagonists may well be disdainful of the establishment, but they still work within its confines. Even our most popular PI substitute, the investigative reporter, ostensibly belongs to a larger organization.

So yes, absolutely, for me a PI character true to the archetype would have to serve a different role in the UK, and the only way I could think of making it plausible for myself was to take the Bruen route and make Innes a completely marginalized character, the natural extrapolation of the grass. That’s not to say it can’t work with the right author – I’m fascinated with what Russel's doing with the PI at the moment, for example, and Declan Hughes is doing fantastic things with the traditional PI in an Irish setting – but it wasn’t right for me.

RDM: I don't know that I one hundred percent agree with Ray here. You can have a lone gunslinger or PI type that exists in UK fiction, but the focus would be very different. I don't think there's the same glamour you could do and that's why the UK PI - on the few occasions he has been attempted - is often a working schlub, a true outsider.
You can "do" the traditional eye approach, but you have to ensure that their reactions are appropriate and acknowledge that the situations in which they find themselves will be very different to those of the American eye. I think the eye as a loner can work in the UK - and, in fact I think this gives them a unique point of view - but like Ray says they faces the horror of a very establishment-oriented society and that basically means that they cannot be "the hero" in the same way as they can in the US. In fact, it often means that even when they try, events are swiftly taken out of their hands and no matter how much they want to, they lose all control.

JS: So the common idea there is you're really looking for the character that belongs on the outside of the society being looked at, the rebel and the observer type. It's interesting that both your characters, Innes and McNee, are Scottish and that seems to work.

RB:I'm not sure that he has to be a rebel. I think he just has to represent the margins, not actively revolt against the established order. But the observer thing is very important, certainly, and is a natural result of being on the margins of society in the first place. I think there's a slight difference in mine and Russel's characters in that I specifically set out to have Innes as a Scot in England, with all the societal transience that would imply. I might be wrong about this, but Russel's character seems to be marginalised less in a geographical sense, but more psychologically. In that respect, I'd argue that his is a more traditional PI. He might disagree, though.

RDM: Ray hits that on the head about McNee being marginalised in an emotional sense. I wasn't thinking consciously about that, of course. I just love characters who have difficulty connecting. But it’s the way it worked out, the only way it could be, I think. As to the question itself, I think that the Scottish character works as one "outside of society" because rebellion and distrust are part of our history and makeup.

I don't know that a fictional PI has to be a rebel, although I think he has to have some moral code that exists outside of the mainstream of the society he works in. He needs a strong internal sense of justice, a desire to try and get to the heart of a case. This tends to only push him further outside of mainstream society because he will not sit quietly by and let his principles be fucked about with by anyone, even those allegedly in "authority". Even Cal Innes, fucked up as he is, has a basic sense of right and wrong that is unique to him, and that he tries (often unsuccessfully) to impose on the world about him.

JS: Focusing on the nationality for a second, even Rebus seemed more convincing as a very American 'maverick cop' than an English character may have done. So can we say that the Scottish voice is the one that works best when questioning the authority in Britain?

RB:Yeah, I think the Scottish attitude is certainly a questioning one, especially when that authority is based in England.

RDM: We're cynical bastards. Not just about the English. We don't even really trust ourselves when all's said and done. I think it’s got something to do with the weather. And our fucking appalling diet.

JS: And a self-destructive streak that can be the only explanation for the Proclaimers! But it is interesting; we've identified elements of the PI that seem to fit with Scottish identity. But aside from that there is something inherent in British culture that romanticizes failure. We do love to see someone who tries and fails, the 'plucky loser' type. There's something very Chandler-esque about that, don't you think?

RDM: Don't mock the Proclaimers - us Fifers are very proud of them! But yes, I think the PI archetype could very easily fit the Scots psyche, and that "plucky loser" you mention there - we were the nation whose 1998 world cup song was "Don't Come Home Too Soon" which probably says everything about our inbuilt pessimism. But yes, I think perhaps it could be applied - to a lesser degree - to the rest of the UK, too.

RB: We are very proud of the Proclaimers. I even name checked 'em in Donkey Punch. Good lads, miracles of modern science. But I don't think we necessarily romanticize failure in the UK, rather I think we demand failure. It's why all our visionaries bugger off to the States. America waits for you to succeed; Britain waits for you to fail, Gawd bless 'er in all her insecure glory.

JS:I wonder if there's not a uniquely British take on the PI that could be used to examine our own society. I'm thinking that the British PI could be seen to be about class. The ‘working Schlub’ as Russel put it.. So he's just another working stiff being controlled by the system, and the system always wins.

RB: Yeah, but by that rationale, so is every single cop protagonist in the genre. Most British crime fiction - the stuff I tend to like, anyway - is about class, because a majority of crime novels have their roots in the social novel, and you can’t write a social novel set in the UK without looking at the class system, even in passing. But yeah, I think British crime fiction would tend towards the system always winning, which would make for a bleak ending.

RDM: I've said it before, and I'll say it again: all good crime fiction is social fiction. It cannot be anything but. And once we get past our obsession with treating authority figures with reverence, British crime fiction is beautifully placed to explore notions of class and social standing. In fact, big recommend here: read Tony Black's Gutted, which winds up being truly about how little class and upbringing means to morality and true social grace.
I'm not so sure I agree with the description that that the PI is "just another working stiff" in fiction because a working stiff is still a cog in the system. The very nature of the PI's work places them outside the system. Which is probably why, in UK crime, he will usually end up seeming either powerless or be defeated which, as Ray says, makes for a bleak outcome.

JS: I definitely agree on social fiction. I think more and more I look for social fiction with a crime element, rather than crime with a social element, if that makes sense? I think it's why I grew into Pelecanos whereas I didn't take to him a few years ago.

RDM: There's only one book of Pelecanos' that didn't quite work for me. But, yes, I love where he's been taking his work - The Long Way Home- was a killer of a novel and The idea of crime fiction as social commentary is a huge hit for me, and honestly, I think Brit crime needs to do it more by moving away from our fascination with authority figures as protagonists. That's why when writers like Ray and Tony Black came along, I was dancing with joy - these lads were taking crime fiction back into the seedy territory that Brit crime of recent decades seems to have overlooked, or only glanced at on occasion.

RB: There was a resurgence in the '90s that gave us some cracking authors like Bruen and Waites. It also gave us a whole load of shite, it has to be said, but there was a moment when it looked as if Brit crime could have followed its American influences and become something more. I mean, check out the Jakubowski Fresh Blood anthologies - there's a real energy in there that I don't see now, not even from those originally featured. Perhaps there simply wasn't the readership for that kind of fiction. And if there wasn't an audience in the middle of a boom period, I shudder to think what the situation is now.

JS: Sort of giving crime back to those who do it for a reason? I’m hoping Chandler would forgive me for that theft. While I’m there though, Chandler has always felt to me more of a moralist than Hammett. If we’re looking at moving British crime away from authority figures and towards that ‘seedy territory,’ would we be looking for a British PI to be more Sam Spade than Phillip Marlowe?

RDM: Yes, Chandler was far more of a moralist - in a traditional sense - than Hammett. I would say that a UK PI would probably be closer to Spade - harder edged, less romantic - than Marlowe. And I say this as a guy who loves Chandler's work.

RB: I was thinking more Ned Beaumont, the poor bastard. Are we then saying that the British PI story is noir by nature?

JS: I think so, yes. And I’d say your Cal Innes quartet went a long way to legitimizing that.

RB: Bollocks, Stringer. Flattering bollocks, but bollocks nonetheless.

JS: I'm serious. After four books on the subject, have you scratched the PI itch?

RB: I've scratched the Innes itch, certainly. Probably the PI one, too. I think I did everything I wanted to do with it. Whether I was successful or not is another matter entirely. But no, I don't see myself coming back to it. Which is a pity, of course - I know everyone's gagging for a Barry DeSilva series.

JS: I still hold out for a Messed up DS Donkin police procedural. Some of the things we've been discussing can be found in your Cal books. Aside from his own self-destructive problems, he's also messed around constantly by the system. He's marked by his time in prison, and the police -through Donkin- seem to have it in for him. Even in the second book, when he leaves Britain for a while, he struggles because he can't quite figure out the rules of his new environment. Was that all part of the plan?

RB: Kind of. The plan, such as it was, was to take elements of the traditional PI story and mess around with them, try and reconcile them to a realist UK setting. So you have character types and events that are quite traditional, which then go a little skew-whiff because of their setting. If I'm going to be poncey, then it was a conscious deconstruction of the PI archetype. If I'm going to be truthful, then it was me bored with seeing the same old Chandler-lite over and over.

JS: Russel, I noticed with THE GOOD SON that you've clearly put a lot of thought into the logic and the realities of being a PI in Britain. When I was doing some research of my own, I was surprised by how many private detectives there are over here. There's a disconnect between the kind of fictional PI's we’ve been discussing, and the realisation that people are actually out there doing the job. Was it important to you to put in the research to make the character work?

RDM: There is a disconnect, and there is always will be. From the little I know, the real PI's take on pretty dull work (from a fictional perspective) and are actually pretty workaday guys. But fiction is always going to be about a kind of hyper-reality, where everything is amped up, especially when it comes to the big emotions and ideas.

But I have tried to ensure that McNee acknowledges the reality of his job, and that it at least feels possible that he could be an eye in the real world. Hence why I've done little things like had him join the Association of British Investigators (although if he keeps down the path he's heading, they might just be taking away his membership) and had him acknowledge the upcoming legislation in regard to licensing his work and so forth. My research wasn't hugely in depth, but I knew I wanted him to feel slightly connected to the real world in that sense.

JS: So McNee's back with THE LOST SISTER. What's he up against this time round?

RDM: This time, McNee's on the case of a missing teenage girl. Her godfather is local hard-man, David Burns, and it soon becomes clear that the girl's mother is hiding even darker secrets. What starts for McNee as a favour for a friend soon becomes a nightmare as he races to find the girl before its too late...

...........

Russel’s new McNee book is released, new and shiny unto the world, this very week. You could order it here, but to get the full experience why not come along to the book launch? J McNee is unlikely to be there, but Russel himself will be playing host.

7 PM, Thursday 1st October
Drouthy Neebors
142 Perth Road
Dundee
United Kingdom

If you want to come along, drop Russel a line at crimescenescotlandATyahoo.co.uk, marking the subject "LOST SISTER LAUNCH". Or mention it in the comments here and I’m sure we can sort it out.

I hope this is just a starting point. We scratched surface, and it would be fun to keep a conversation going in the comments. Feel free to join in and run with it. And not just about British fiction; what do you like or dislike about the PI stuff? Lets hear about the genre in different countries, different voices. The topic of social crime fiction is something we touched on, and i think its fair to say each of us is interested in that angle. I could have gone off on a tangent right there. If anything, I'd say we showed there is no straight forward answer.

I think that a genre, an idea, or a character is only as good as the people writing it. And these guys are two of the best.

Investigating the Investigator

By Russel D McLean

This post – an entirely fictional interview with an entirely fictional character – contains mild spoilers for THE GOOD SON.
J. McNee – he won’t give me his first name – is a private investigator working out of the Scots city of Dundee. Last year I was privileged to chronicle his investigative work, and again it seems I’ve been allowed back to chronicle one of his most recent high profile cases. Seemed a good time to catch up, see what was on his mind. We met at his offices on 1 Courthouse Square, and when I went in he was the one making the coffee. As ever, there was a slight air of sadness just below the surface whenever he talked, and I was loathe to ask him about how he was coping two years on from the death of his fiancée. But there was something else, too, a kind of change I could sense in him. From the most recent case? Or the passage of time? I was eager to find out… but getting the answers you want from a man like McNee isn’t an easy task…

Russel D McLean: I’m glad you could take out the time to talk to is. Its been just under a year since we last clocked in with you.

J McNee: Sure. Doesn’t feel that long.

RDM: How much has changed in your life?

JM: Hard to say. I’m still working. Haven’t found a replacement for Bll [Bill was McNee’s assistant before an incident involving two London hard men]

RDM: So he’s gone?

JM: I couldn’t fit access for his chair to the offices. And his boyfriend, Andy, blamed me for what happened. For putting him in that chair in the first place.

RDM: Do you think he’s right?

JM: Some days, aye, I’d agree with him. But you have to keep moving on. So I’m still working as in investigator. Still taking on cases. Been doing some work with a guy at the local paper, The Dundee Herald.

RDM: Cameron Connelly?

JM: That’s yer man. He’s had some troubles himself. His brother-in-law was an investigator.

RDM: Used to work out of your offices. Guy named Bryson. I knew him a little.

JM: Anyway, Connelly’s been getting me some gigs. Mostly on the QT considering his lords and masters don’t appreciate any extra expense.

RDM: He was the one told you about the Furst case?

JM: Aye. A favour for a friend. Can I give you some advice? Never do favours for friends. It never works out well.

RDM: Last time we spoke, you and PC Susan Bright had started to patch up your differences. I was never too clear why you stopped speaking the first place.

JM: (pause) It was complicated. As anything personal is. And this case… the missing girl… there’s been some fallout. I’m not sure what any of it means, of course.

RDM: You’ve been seen working with a man I believe to be another investigator.

JM: Wickes.

RDM: Looks like a cross between Brian Blessed and the BFG.

JM: Wickes. His name is Wickes. He was an investigator back in the day. Now, he’s… he doesn’t operate on the books, let’s put it that way.

RDM: And he’s a friend of yours?

JM: (silence).

RDM: Without getting too personal, I understand that with this case, there were some official questions being asked about –

JM: – I can’t talk about it.

RDM: We need to –

JM: – I won’t talk about it. Are you getting the message yet?

RDM: Following the suicide you investigated a year ago, it seems like your investigations seem to attract this kind of controversy I’m trying to talk about. All I want to –

JM: – The interview’s over, pal. We can’t talk about that.

Can’t or won’t? It’s hard to tell with a guy like McNee. Leaving the interview, I was sure there was more going on than I knew about his latest case. The missing girl, Mary Furst, was fourteen years old, seemed like any other girl. Except her godfather was a known criminal and I got the impression that there had been other secrets hidden by her more immediate family. And then there was this guy Wickes. When I started asking McNee about him, the atmosphere shifted in the room. Something happened between them that McNee wanted to avoid talking about. Something bad. Something deadly…

J. McNee’s latest case is chronicled in THE LOST SISTER, by Russel D McLean, available in the UK from Five Leaves Publications on October 1. The first McNee novel, THE GOOD SON is available now in the UK and will be release in the US by St Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne in December ’09.