Dundee Noir

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you a dark man for a dark time.  Scottish author Russel D McLean. 

Eats puppies

He's come by to talk about his new crime novel THE LOST SISTER.
  

Does not have a happy ending

And about the dark side of his home town of Dundee. 

Full of Morris Dancers. 

Take it away, Mr. McLean.

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LA.

Big city. Bright lights.  A million dreams, most of them broken.

You don’t get more noir than LA. Right?

Don’t count on it. Today, I’m going to take you away from the City of Angels. In fact, I’m gonna take you on a little transatlantic trip. Don’t worry. You’re not going to wind up dead in a strange land. Not if you stick close to me.

Oh, who am I? Yeah, I’m not Blackmoore. I may have a beard, but I talk a little funny and I’m a little stockier, too. It comes from eating all that Haggis, you see. My name is Russel D McLean, and I’m a crime writer. My second novel, THE LOST SISTER just came out from the fine, beautiful folks at St Martin’s and to celebrate, I’ve been invading various blogs across the internet. Barging in and taking the poor, unsuspecting readers by surprise. But don’t worry, I won’t show you what’s under my kilt.

Instead, like I said, I’m going to take you somewhere. To the place I write about. A far cry from Los Angeles. A place so removed, it might even be a different planet to some of you.

Dundee. Scotland. The east coast, on the banks of the River Tay. At its heart is the Law Hill, a now extinct volcano that watches peacefully over the city. It’s a city with a long and varies history and whole every schoolchild in Scotland can probably recite the Three “J”’s of Dundee (Jam, Jute and Journalism) they might not be able to tell why the city is the perfect setting for a series of crime thrillers. Until recently, its been considered a distant fourth place behind Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, but its this relative obscurity that has made it, for me, the ideal place to set my two crime novels THE GOOD SON and its recently released follow-up THE LOST SISTER. It’s a city that is constantly changing and evolving. With new money coming from the computer games industry and medical research, much of the city is changing, but it’s this kind of atmosphere that always makes for an intriguing crime novel. And, as I discovered a few years after moving here, there was a darker side to the City of Discovery than I had ever expected.

In 2006, a book spent ten weeks at the top of the Scottish book charts. It was a true crime book based solely around Dundee. At that time, I was between agents and feeling a little hopeless. Wondering if I’d made a mistake to write about the city. The success of THE LAW KILLERS showed me there was still a potential, and of course I bought the book to see what I had missed in this city; what kind of darkness lurked in the heart of Dundonians.

This is a city where we have had own Black Dahlia style murders. In the late 1970’s, a woman’s body – her name was Carol Lanner – was found in the Templeton woods by a couple out for a walk. Her naked body was covered by the snow and she had died violently. The hunt was massive and would eventually prove near futile. Her belongings would be found 85 miles away. There would be several arrests that would amount to nothing. And a second body would also be found.

The investigation would last for decades. In 2005 an arrest would be made, the suspect later released by the police. 

There have been killers inspired by the film DIRTY HARRY. A murder at a local gunshop   led to the eventual arrest of two lads who planned  to use their haul to pull off a kidnapping that would result in the ransom drop being made in the style of the first Dirty Harry film, the courier being directed to payphones across the city, the tour designed to throw off police surveillance. It sounds incredible, but the plans found by police were detailed and given the brutal nature of the initial killing, there is no doubt they would have followed through on their plans.

The case of Robert Mone (sensationalised in various reports here by the Daily Record), a disturbed individual who held a siege in a school before later killing three people in an attempted breakout from the hospital where he was being held was another case that would shock the city. But even more shocking was the fact that his father would later kill three people. It is the kind of tragedy that speaks to the darker side of human nature, that shows you such events are no respecter of geography.

We’ve even had a brush with “celebrity” crime in Dundee. When I was a student, one of my flatmates pointed out that across the street, one of the flats was associated with Jack The Ripper. A little research proved that one of the suspects for the infamous series of London killings had indeed lived in Dundee for a short while.

In short, the truth is that here in Dundee, there’s a dark and seedy side to the city. As there is in any urban space. Los Angeles may have its sprawling areas of deprivation, but Dundee’s relatively compact space presents its own intriguing twilight world. The history of crime here in the city on its own makes for fascinating research, adding a flavour to fiction stories by writers such as myself of Dundee Book Prize winner Chris Longmuir whose own novel, DEAD WOOD was directly influenced by the Templeton Woods murders.

I have yet to use any real life crime as a plot point or inspiration, but the knowledge of the darker sides of the streets here informs my writing and helps me to paint the shadow side of the city. Of course it is only one side of the story, and like any city Dundee has its sunnier side, something that crime writers can use to create contrasts and textures.

It may not be the city of Angels, but Dundee holds just as many dark secrets along its centuries old streets. There really are a million stories in this naked city. THE LOST SISTER, like the old Los Angeles PI stories, chronicles the mean streets in a fictional fashion. But just because it’s fictional doesn’t mean there is no noir side to the reality of this exciting, vibrant and constantly evolving city I have chosen to write about.

The Lost Sister is available in hardcover and e-book from St Martin’s Press (US) and in paperback from Five Leaves publications (UK)