Alex J. Craig looks at two emerging Scottish crime writers

Out of the Shadows

Jackie McLean

Crime writing is a crowded field. New writers are queueing up to get in. But it’s not easy.

First, there’s a lot of competition, so you have to be good, very good, to get published. Then there’s the time factor. It can take years for a book to be noticed by an agent or a publisher. And then they might ask you to rewrite most of your masterpiece. Finally, there’s the economics. The market is dominated by big publishers who don’t like taking risks. So they stick with the well-known names and don’t waste their money on people nobody’s heard of. So it’s the small, independent publishers who take the risks and back the newcomers. Sometimes they strike it lucky: Saraband had a hit on their hands when His Bloody Project by Graeme McRae Burnet was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

Without a good story you just won’t get published

Those are practical issues. But there are literary ones too. How does a new author make their work stand out from the crowd that’s already packed into the room? By being a writer of consummate prose? That’s useful, but not essential. Most readers just want to read a good story. By developing great characters? That’s more useful. Characters need to be memorable, otherwise all those time-worn smoking drinking divorced sad-but-brilliant detective inspectors just blend into one. But at the start it’s the plot that counts. Without a good story you just won’t get published. And if the plot is good, the characters and the quality of the prose can come later.