The Blood Road: Guest Post by Stuart MacBride

Stuart MacBride:
The Blood Road

I’ve been writing about the northeast of Scotland for about sixteen years now. Which is a lot of time. That’s about the same length of time you’d serve over here for murdering someone. I suppose, to be fair, I have murdered dozens and dozens of people, but they weren’t real people – I made them up, so that’s OK.

Most of my murderous rampage has been in and around Aberdeen, the city where I grew up. This is for two reasons. 1: it’s my hometown and why should Edinburgh and Glasgow get all the serial killers, and 2: there’s a lot less travel involved when I have to research something. That kind of thing is important when you’ve not had to commute to work for thirteen years. These days my journey to work involves making a cup of tea in the kitchen, then wandering through to the study and the desk where I seem to spend about 90% of my life. The only traffic jams I get stuck in involve cats.

Which is all very different to how it used to be, struggling along tiny winding back roads, in one huge line of traffic after the next, in order to get to an industrial estate in the Bridge of Don for half eight in the morning. And then back again after six. Always in rush hour. Which makes me appreciate my feline traffic jams even more.

Of course, that’s all about to change. Because, at long last, Aberdeen is getting a bypass!

This probably seems like a weird thing for a crime writer to bang on about in a piece for Mystery Readers International, but bear with me.

In some ways a bypass is like the aftermath of a crime. It allows us to skirt around something without ever having to face/drive through it. It keeps what it bypasses hidden. But more than that – and a lot less pretentious – is the fact that it provided the inspiration for THE BLOOD ROAD. See, I told you I was going somewhere with this. I was driving into town last September, caught in yet another long line of slow-moving traffic, so had time to look around as we crawled between the lines of orange cones. There, up on the hill to the right, in the distance, was the bypass being built. A swathe of brown churned-up earth reached down from the top of the hill towards us, bright yellow earth movers growling away on the brow. Flapping lines of tape, caught between marker pegs.

Now, Aberdeen has been waiting for its bypass for over forty years. Eighteen wheelers thunder along the little side roads for miles around the city, trying to avoid going through it. We’re talking the kind of road that has passing places. Not much fun when you turn the corner and come bumper to radiator with an articulated lorry (or “truck”, if you’re of the American persuasion) doing sixty. That’s change-of-pants time (or “underwear”, if you’re still American after the whole “truck/lorry” incident). They could have built it decades ago, when the Oil industry was at its peak. Back in the seventies, the oil companies actually offered the city council millions of pounds to build a ring road, but the council, like the stalwart geniuses that they were, turned the money down and left Aberdeen to be crushed under the weight of its own traffic. Ah, politicians – aren’t they great? But at long last we’re getting a bypass to relieve the city’s clogged arteries.

And as I sat there in the crawling traffic, looking up at the earthmoving equipment bringing our new bypass down the hill, I thought, “What would happen if those diggers and bulldozers found something buried? Something that someone would kill to keep hidden?”

From that dark and twisted seed THE BLOOD ROAD grew.

***

Stuart MacBride is a Scottish writer, most famous for his crime thrillers set in the "Granite City" of Aberdeen and featuring Detective Sergeant Logan McRae. Stuart MacBride was born Feb 27 1969 in Dumbarton, Scotland and raised in Aberdeen. His careers include scrubbing toilets offshore, graphic design, web design and IT/computer programming. MacBride's publishing deal was secured with the writing of Halfhead, however the publishers were more interested in Cold Granite, concerning DS Logan MacRae. His books have sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide, been translated into 18 languages and won numerous awards, including the ITV crime thriller award. In 2015 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Dundee University. He now lives in north-east Scotland with his wife, Fiona and their cat Grendel. He is reputed to be a passionate potato grower, but claims to have a "vegetable patch full of weeds". The Blood Road, the latest in the Logan McRae series, will be published on September 4.

Staying in Your Lane: Should Authors Only Write What They Know? Guest post by Stuart Neville aka Haylen Beck

Stuart Neville (aka Haylen Beck):
Staying in Your Lane: Should Authors Only Write What They Know?

If you’ve been paying attention to bookish social media lately, you’ll have noticed a topic that’s been drawing much attention: the way men write women. Although this subject has surfaced before, this particular surge was sparked by a hapless author boasting that he was living proof that a man can write a woman in an entirely convincing way. The author posted a brief excerpt from one of his own works, and it was … not good. Given that his supposedly well-drawn female character was little more than a pair of breasts perched atop a pair of skin-tight jeans, the backlash was inevitable.

But some good did come of it. The ensuing discussion went on for several days, including a flood of hilarious tweets where women described themselves as a male author would. Irish author Jane Casey’s was among the best, and most cutting. As a male author who has written several novels with female protagonists, I couldn’t help but cringe. Most writers are all too familiar with Imposter Syndrome, and my insecurities were enflamed as I wondered about my own work. While some of the sweeping generalisations bothered me, I’d like to think that anything that makes me think a little harder about my own work can only be positive.

All of this raised the question, however, of “staying in your lane”. Should an author stick with their own gender, sexual, racial, or cultural identity when writing a point-of-view character? My novel HERE AND GONE, written under the pen name of Haylen Beck, has me leaving my lane with two characters. My protagonist, Audra Kinney, is of course a woman, a mother, and a survivor of an abusive marriage. Another point-of-view character is Danny Lee, a Chinese American man from San Francisco. Neither of these characters has much in common with me, other than them both being parents. But if I only wrote characters who were like me – middle aged Irishmen with shaggy beards and questionable taste in music – then even I wouldn’t want to read my books.

The old maxim of “write what you know” doesn’t stretch very far, particularly when it comes to writing thrillers. The author must inevitably step into someone else’s shoes and we can’t constantly fall back on the default white male character. Diversity is the reality of our world and must show in our work. So how does one stray out of one’s lane with any degree of believability and sensitivity? There is only one answer, and it may be an uncomfortable one for writers used to a solitary existence: talk to people.

When it came to Audra, I didn’t have to look too far to get some insights into things like motherhood: my wife, God bless her, acts as a sounding board for me when I’m plotting and fleshing out characters. Whenever I feel I need a woman’s view on what I’m doing, she’s always there. So much so, in fact, that by the time I’ve finished a novel, she knows it as well as I do. For Danny Lee, I turned to my good friend Henry Chang, author of the excellent Chinatown Beat series of detective novels set in New York. Henry kindly helped me round out the character of Danny: who he is, how he exists in his community, and the way he sees the world. If I didn’t bring Danny convincingly to life, that is my failure, but if I did, I have Henry to thank.

The moral of all this is simply that a writer can write about any gender, sexuality, ethnicity – I could go on – they want, so long as it’s done with care and empathy. In other words, good writers write good characters. It’s really as simple as that.

***
Internationally acclaimed, prizewinning crime writer Stuart Neville’s latest novel, Here and Gone, was published in paperback by Broadway Books on May 1, 2018, under the pen name Haylen Beck. His Haylen Beck novels are set in the United States and are inspired by his love of American crime writing. The author won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was nominated for an Edgar Award, and made best-of-year lists with numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe.