How amazing! Our blog seems to possess a life of its own now, with its authors sometimes desperately trying to follow it ! There are so many roads opening everywhere that we sometimes feel as if lost in a labyrinth. Mind you ! That’s the kind of thing that may well happen to you if you visit some of the splendid parks surrounding a number of Scottish castles. We’ve came upon many a very intricate and inviting maze there …

If you like to be told good stories, go to Scotland. Scottish people seem to possess the art of story-telling. Days are long gone by when people used to gather by the fireside, at the hour of the “ceilidh” but there are many other ways today to listen to the story-tellers !

How we came to focus on Scottish crime fiction rather than on other literary genres I still wonder, but we’re finding new good reasons to follow this road everyday…

The popularity of Scottish crime fiction is striking. Just have a look at the titles being published there regularly! Be it due or not to the very special atmosphere we immediately feel on arriving in Scotland, the country seems to be good ground to generate books focusing on the gloomy side of life and to give birth to dark characters in keeping with this atmosphere.

In Scotland the gothic style flourishes as beautifully as the pricky thistle and that’s seems to be a good environment for crime writing. Give a pen to a naturally talented story-teller endowed with a deep sense of place and a gift for empathy, capable of creating true-to life characters constantly oscillating, in lively dialogues, between dark humour and melancholy along the lines of a plot well put together and you may expect to read soon the best crime story ever written. There seems to be many such writers in Scotland. We’ll try to create, in Scotiana, a gallery of these authors and also to establish a list (one more) of their most unforgettable “creatures” : detectives and criminals as well as ordinary people, “l’homme de la rue” as we say in France…

On our blog, we have already introduced Conan Doyle, Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre, Denise Mina, Sue Walker and Ann Cleeves who is not Scottish but has become famous for her Shetland Quartet. That’s a good beginning. Let’s go on with David Ashton. This writer, who is also an actor, was born in Greenock, near Glasgow, in 1941 . His best known crime books are featuring an Edinburgh detective who is portrayed after a real detective who was famous in Edinburgh in the Victorian era when Conan Doyle was still a student.

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While investigating in the field of Scottish crime fiction I fell upon a very interesting article written by Sandra Dick and entitled “Meet James McLevy – the original n° 1 detective”. It was published in the Scotsman on 30 May 2007. It begins like this :

LURKING in the eerie closes, the crowded, stinking tenements and along the Old Town’s dark, damp wynds, petty crime, debauchery and all forms of human brutality festered. Pilferers, pickpockets, prostitutes, vagrants, robbers and burglars. And, very often, murderers.

It was Edinburgh in the mid-19th century, the birthplace of the Enlightenment, a respected seat of learning and home to the cream of Scottish society.

But, as Irish farmer’s son James McLevy quickly discovered, Scotland’s capital was also a rich melting pot for its vile, lawless dregs. So it was just as well that he was on the case (…)

“I was doing research for a television play about Conan Doyle and came across a passing mention of James McLevy,” recalls David. “I asked at the British Library and after what seemed like a couple of hours this book appeared, a sorry looking thing, falling to pieces and tied up with a piece of dingy ribbon.　

“I opened it up and it was like entering another world. Here was this person with this wild humour which I liked, a kind of grandiose quality, someone who really fancied himself as a philosopher with a big character.”

heritage.scotsman.com/people/Meet-James-McLevy–the.3291136.jp

Officially named on Edinburgh City Police’s payroll records as their ‘number 1’ detective in a team of six, over three decades McLevy was involved in around 3000 cases. ”

Indeed I have discovered a book about the famous Edinburgh detective…

and there is even a BBC audio.

The book is introduced by Quintin Jardine, a well-known Scottish crime-writer. You will find below the Amazon review of the book.

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Edinburgh has provided the backdrop to stories of detection for almost a century and a half. In the 1860s, a few years before Conan Doyle began his medical studies at Edinburgh University, there appeared a hugely popular series of books with titles including”Curiosities of Crime in Edinburgh, The Sliding Scale of Life and The Disclosures of a Detective. They were all the work of one James McLevy, an Edinburgh policeman. The now largely forgotten, McLevy was one of the first exponents of the crime genre and a likely influence on the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Like Conan Doyle, McLevy had an Irish background. He was born in Co Armagh, the son of a small farmer. Largely self-educated, he joined the Edinburgh police force in 1830 as a night watchman before rising up through the ranks to become a detective. The collection of stories in this book are based on some of the 2,220 cases he dealt with in the course of his career, wonderfully evoking the spirit of the city, and the vivid descriptions of its criminal classes as they moved between the very different worlds of the Old and New Towns. It is introduced by Quintin Jardine.

As a result of our wide-ranging investigations more and more books are piling on our desk everyday, together with lists of authors, biographical notes, literary events calendars and so on and so on… so to get a clearer view of the situation we’ve felt the need to appeal to experts in crime fiction. There are many of them, I can tell you.

I’d like to mention first The Crime Writers Association whose prestigious awards are famous all over the world. We are grateful to them for the precious help they kindly gave us, through the intermediary  of a friendly and learned gentleman, Mr Roger Cornwell, who has answered in French to one of our questions :  Le CWA n’a pas de siege social, car c’est une organisation virtuelle. Les membres du comité habite dans des villes differentes. Amitiés !!!

On the CWA website we’ve found very up-to-date and first-hand information about crime fiction and authors. For example, I’ve just learned that on Monday 5 October 2009 Ann Cleeves would be present at the Inverness Book Festival. If only we could be there ! I must confess I have another good reason to like this Association. Didn’t they grant their prestigious CWA International Dagger Award three times in four years to my favourite French crime novelist : Fred Vargas. For those of our readers who could be interested in French crime fiction (but doesn’t such writing go beyond frontiers…) the three books which were granted the prestigious CWA International Dagger Awards are the following ones : The Chalk Circle Man in 2009 (L’homme aux cercles bleus 1991) – Wash this Blood in 2007 (Sous les vents de Neptune 2004) and The Three Evangelists in 2006 (Debout les morts 1995)

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Today, I fell upon another book entitled The Origins of the American Detective Story whose cover did appeal to me at once. The subject seems to be quite interesting and the book has been written by an eminent Professor who is also an award-winning author. From what I’ve learned in the synopsis of the book, LeRoy Lad Panek, who has written a number of books about crime fiction, focuses in this one on two masters of detective stories : Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle. According to him, with Murders in the Rue Morgue published in 1841, Edgar Allan Poe would be the inventor of the detective story as a literary genre and, forty years later, in 1891, with the publication of The Scandal in Bohemia, Conan Doyle would “reintroduce respectability to detective fiction with his emphasis on logic, reason and methodical thinking.” Quite interesting indeed. I will tell you more as soon as this book  will reach my pile of books to read.

It seems as if crime fiction novels and thrillers are gaining in respectability and are no longer considered as books only written to entertain their readers but as a literary genre in themself. Crime fiction and thrillers may also serve to convey some very important messages about threatening dangers … As I keep saying, especially when I’m reading an unforgettable passage of a book by Fred Vargas : ‘un polar c’est souvent bien plus qu’un polar’.

A bientôt!