Edinburgh: A Sense of Place in Scottish Crime Fiction
Sue-Walker-Scottish-Crime-Fiction-Author photograph by A Hargreaves
(…) “I was asked by an acquaintance recently how the inspiration for my novels came about. A common enough question and I had a straightforward reply. ‘Location, location, location.’ And that answer, to a great extent, is the whole truth. It is certainly the case that the locations used in The Reckoning (the island of Fidra and the East Lothian coast) and the forthcoming The Dead Pool (the Water of Leith in Edinburgh) inspired me long before I had even conceived of a single character or plot line. At some point I knew, just knew, that these places had to be central to my stories. But then that begs the question of why some locations inspire and others do not? What exactly is it about a particular place that sparks off an idea? In some ways I’m rather loathe to over-analyse this. Does it matter if it works and keeps working for me? On the other hand, there is obviously a pattern there and maybe it’s worth looking at. It would appear that in my case the answer to what sparks it all off is beauty. More than one person has remarked that I seem to like using the most beautiful locations and turning them into places of hell. ‘You put the dark into light’, as someone told me not long ago.”
Location, Location, Location… Putting the Dark into Light
Sue Walker on the three Ls of writing a great crime novel
Source: http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000066312,00.html
Mairiuna, the above quote from Sue Walker got me thinking…
Even though 71 Scottish crime fiction novels have their adventure plot set in Edinburgh, how many Scottish crime fiction authors were actually born in Edinburgh?
After researching the internet, surprisingly enough, I found less than a dozen!
The Reckoning - Sue Walker
-Paul Johnston
-Grace Monroe
-Helen and Morna Mulgray
-Robert Louis Stevenson
-Arthur Conan Doyle
-Irvine Welsh
Am I missing someone …?
.
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