If you’re eligible for Crime in the Spotlight – apply! What have you got to lose?

As we launch our Crime in the Spotlight slots – an annual initiative which sees new crime writers reading an extract of their work in front of a packed Bloody Scotland audience – we caught up with former participant Liz Webb. Liz, who read an extract of her debut novel The Daughter at the festival back in 2022, will return to the festival this year to discuss her second novel, The Saved at our Dark Islands event on Friday the 13th of September. The novelist will appear alongside fellow authors George Paterson and Claire McGowan.

Can you tell us about your Crime in the Spotlight experience?

“My Crime in the Spotlight experience was great. My publisher Allison & Busby encouraged me to apply and I thought: oh, I’ll never get in. But then, amazingly, I was given a slot, which was absolutely fantastic.

“It’s the most brilliant thing because it allows very new writers with no real presence to get up on stage in big venues with amazing people. Gordon J. Brown introduced me to the audience, and then I got to do my reading before Denzil Meyrick and Alex Gray were interviewed on stage. Both of the authors are absolutely fantastic. They were so nice and encouraging.

“I’d practiced my reading so many times that I knew it off by heart! I was so incredibly nervous, but it was a great experience. Everyone was so lovely.

“We did a little practice beforehand. I was a standup comedian many years ago, but nowadays I’m quite a nervous person. Thankfully, once I was up on stage, the old standup within me kicked in and I was able to really enjoy the experience. After you read you get to do a book signing alongside the authors who are headlining the event which was absolutely fantastic.”

How did the experience help you as an author?

“It really helped me because I hadn’t appeared at any of the big festivals at that point. It’s really good to get over the horror of reading your work and realising that actually, everyone gets a bit nervous. It’s very good for your profile too because Bloody Scotland send you social media assets to help promote the fact that you’re appearing at the festival – and that does make a difference. It ups your profile and gives your social media a boost, which helps attract the attention of the industry.”

Applications are now open for 2024. What would you say to anyone who was thinking about applying?

If you’re eligible then apply – 100%. What have you got to lose? It’s totally worth doing it and not just for the experience of reading. Bloody Scotland has got this slightly magical feel to it and everyone is so friendly. It’s worth going for the whole weekend and attending the panels and the Golden Lion Bar – that’s a great place to meet fellow authors and readers too.

You’ll be at the festival to talk about your latest novel, The Saved. Can you tell us about the book?

“The Saved centres around Nancy and Calder, a young couple who move from London to the fictional Scottish slate island of Langer. Within a week, Nancy sees Calder’s body floating in the bay outside. Nancy and the man who runs the church drag the body onto the ground but Calder cannot be resuscitated. The emergency services fly his body by helicopter to Glasgow and the doctor says – and this is a real thing in medicine – ‘you’re not dead until you are warm and dead’. Calder has had a heart attack when he’s freezing cold. It’s very rare, but under these circumstances you can actually be brought back to life up to six hours later.

“Nancy doesn’t believe that Calder can be revived, but the doctors take his blood out of his body and warm it up one degree at a time and feed it back in, before giving him an electric shock. They manage to bring him back and it feels like a miracle. They test his brainwaves, and Calder is fine, but when Nancy looks into his eyes, she doesn’t see her partner. There is something drastically wrong. They go back to the island together, but as far as Nancy is concerned, she’s going back there with a stranger.

Your panel at Bloody Scotland centres around ‘Dark Islands’. Why do they make such good settings for crime novels?

“I think islands have this extra intensity to them.  I visited the Scottish slate islands of Seil, Easdale and Luing during a writing retreat and took inspiration from them for the book. I live in London and I’m used to being able to get anywhere I want at any time of day or night, but on these small islands the ferries stop and you can’t leave. As a city dweller, I found that really amazing. They’re also very wind swept, distant and can be quite old fashioned – which is not to smear the people who live there at all – but they do have a more traditional feel about them that lends itself well to a novel setting.

“That, coupled with weather that can be extreme and changeable – creates perfect conditions for a tensely plotted book. You’ve also got a fixed number of people living in a place like that – so in many ways it’s like an extended escape room setting – which suits the crime genre perfectly.”

Liz Webb will appear at Bloody Scotland at our Dark Islands event on Friday the 13th of September at the Holy Trinity Church.

LONGLIST REVEALED FOR THE MCILVANNEY PRIZE 2024:

D V Bishop – A Divine Fury (Pan Macmillan)

Chris Brookmyre – The Cracked Mirror (Sphere)

Val McDermid – Past Lying (Sphere)

Charles Cumming – Kennedy 35 (HarperCollins)

Andrew James Greig – The Girl in the Loch (Storm Publishing)

Doug Johnstone – The Collapsing Wave (Orenda)

S G Maclean – The Winter List (Quercus)

Abir Mukherjee – Hunted (Vintage)

C S Robertson – The Trials of Marjory Crowe (Hodder & Stoughton)

Kim Sherwood – A Spy Like Me (HarperCollins)

Doug Sinclair – Blood Runs Deep (Storm Publishing)

Douglas Skelton – The Hollow Mountain (Polygon) 

This year the prize will be judged by BBC Scotland presenter, Bryan Burnett; Category Manager for Waterstones, Angie Crawford and Journalist and Editor, Arusa Qureshi.

The McIlvanney longlist and the Bloody Scotland shortlist will be promoted in bookshops throughout Scotland in the period between the announcement and the presentation at 6pm on Friday 13 September. 

A Bloody Good Chat with Ruth Ware

After revealing crime writer Ruth Ware as one of our Bloody Scotland ‘sneaky peeks’ last week, we thought it would be nice to get to know her a little better! The author of In a Dark, Dark Wood and Zero Days, who will appear at the Albert Halls alongside Louise Minchin on Sunday the 15^th of September, says she’s thrilled to be part of this year’s programme.

“I love Bloody Scotland. Crime festivals are always just the best fun because crime readers are the nicest readers and crime writers are the nicest writers. And I’m not just saying that – it’s been scientifically proven!

“The nice thing about Bloody Scotland is that Stirling is such a small city, so everyone who is part of the festival stays within a stone’s throw of each other. It gives it a really lovely communal feel. Everybody’s hanging out at the Golden Lion. It just feels like an incredibly friendly festival – it has this ‘come as you are’ atmosphere. Everybody there is a reader and everyone has come along to enjoy themselves.

This year, you’ll be appearing alongside Louise Minchin. What can Bloody Scotland fans expect from your event?

“I haven’t had the chance to read Louise’s book, Isolation Island, yet, but it sounds brilliant. Both Louise and I have written reality tv thrillers, so we’ll be talking about that. Mine is One Perfect Couple and it’s set on a kind of desert island. It’s a Lord of the Flies type story. Things go horribly wrong. The fresh water supply starts to run down, so there’s an awful lot of cracked lips and people slowly becoming dehydrated. Whereas Louise’s novel sounds like it’s sort of climatically the polar opposite. It’s set on a windswept island.

“I think it’s going to be really interesting to look at how two writers have taken what, on paper, sounds like a pretty similar idea and have gone off in completely different directions. We’ll also be discussing how an island setting can play into some of the best loved tropes of the genre. You know, stuff like locked room mysteries, isolated locations and a closed cast of suspects. I’m really looking forward to it. I think it’s going be a really fun event.”

Where did the inspiration for One Perfect Couple come from?

Well, the funny thing is, I’m actually not a huge reality TV fan, which makes me feel like a bit of an imposter. I watched and really enjoyed the first couple of series of Big Brother. All of my friends were addicted to it, so we all watched it and gossiped about it. And then I just kind of drifted away from reality tv. I had kids and a really demanding job, and there were so many of those types of shows popping up. It was really hard to keep up. But then The Traitors came out in the UK and I absolutely adored it.

“I think as a crime writer, what I loved was the crime adjacent format. You know, the fact that it’s all about figuring out who’s lying, who’s telling the truth, who’s deceiving other people for their own gain and how far contestants will you go to win.

“Then I was at an author event with the writer Gillian McAllister, and we were talking about reality TV. I think I said something like, it’s a miracle more people on those shows don’t end up murdering each other because the stakes are so high. You can see the producers winding the contestants up to such a pitch where sometimes it really does feel like it wouldn’t take much for them to come to blows. And Gillian said, as a kind of joke, oh that sounds like a Ruth Ware novel! I didn’t really think anything of it at the time, but then when I sat down to write what became One Perfect Couple, her words kind of came back to me!”

What compels you to write crime thrillers?

“I love books that have a really strong cerebral element to them. I like a really strong puzzle. As a reader, I love reading books where you are kind of in a battle of wits almost with the author. You can see that they’re laying out the clues. You can see they’re giving you information and it feels like you’re in a race to solve the puzzle, before the characters in the book solve it.

“But as a reader, I also really love books that have a huge amount of heart in them and a really strong emotional storyline.  As a reader, you really feel what the characters are feeling – you’re terrified when they’re terrified. The thing about psychological thrillers, and particularly the kind that I write, is that you don’t have to choose. You can have both of those things. You can have that puzzly aspect where there’s a great twist and you’re sort of like, oh! I should have guessed that. But you can also have characters that you’re really, really invested in and a strong emotional thread to pull you through the story.”

What’s the best thing about being a crime thriller writer?

“The community. The readers and the other writers are genuinely lovely. And crime festivals are always such fun because, you know, the crowds are just so good. The readers are so good, they’re so generous, they’re so intelligent, they’re so well read. And, you know, likewise for my fellow writers, they’re just an incredibly generous bunch. I think there’s often a feeling that writers are in competition with each other – and on some level we are in that we’re all going for, you know, the same Richard and Judy slots or the same supermarket promotions. But actually, we’re not in the sense that what’s good for the genre, is good for all of us. If a really, really good crime thriller comes out and the author really nails it, it makes readers go back to that section and look for other authors who might be doing something similar. And that’s really great for all of us.”

You can find out more about Ruth Ware and her work over her website: https://ruthware.com/

Ruth will appear at Bloody Scotland alongside Louise Minchin, on Sunday the 15^th of September from 12pm – 1pm. You can book tickets to this event and all of our ‘sneaky peeks’, here: https://bloodyscotland.com/whats-on/

The Bloody Scotland Debut Prize celebrates its 5th Anniversary this year. Previous winners include Claire Askew (2019), Deborah Masson (2020), Robbie Morrison (2021), Tariq Ashkanani (2022) and Kate Foster (2023) who has gone on to be longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024 and shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger 2024.

The full shortlist for the 2024 Bloody Scotland Debut Prize is:

Suzy Aspley with Crow Moon (Orenda). Suzy was born in South Shields and grew up in Tyne and Wear but she has lived near Aberfoyle in Stirlingshire for the past two decades. A regular attendee of the festival she won Pitch Perfect in 2019 with the idea that became Crow Moon.

Daniel Aubrey with Dark Island (Harper North). Daniel grew up in Cheshire but now lives in Moffat in Dumfriesshire. He first attended Bloody Scotland in 2022 when his friend, Sarah Smith, was shortlisted for the debut award and his own debut was just going out on submission. He was back in 2023 when his partner, Danielle Devlin, was selected for ‘Crime in the Spotlight’.

Allan Gaw with The Silent House of Sleep (SA Press). A medical pathologist by training Allan was a runner up in the 2023 Glencairn / Bloody Scotland short crime story competition and his story – The Last Tram to Gorbals Cross – went on to be published in Scottish Field magazine in April 2023.

Doug Sinclair with Blood Runs Deep (Storm Publishing). Born in Edinburgh and now living in Armadale, Doug first visited Bloody Scotland in 2014 to attend the Masterclass. He has attended every year since and credits the encouragement of the friends and authors he’s met at the festival with the reason he finished the book, signed with an agent and secured a three-book deal.

Martin Stewart with Double Proof (Polygon). A former English teacher and middle grade author, Martin supported the festival in 2017 by delivering schools events in Balfron and Stirling. He also made his debut in goals for the Scotland v England football match. He has represented Scotland twice since and is proud that all were Scottish victories. He lives in South Ayrshire.

Hello, and welcome to our May issue. This latest edition is jam packed with news! We’re bringing you our programme launch date, information about our brand new website and an exclusive interview with our Festival Director Bob McDevitt, who’s giving us some fascinating insights into this year’s programme. So, without further ado, let’s crack on with this month’s issue.

Hello, and welcome to the April issue of our newsletter! In this edition, we’re sharing some exciting CWA news and having a nosy at our summer book club reading list. We’re also treating you to not one but two brilliant interviews. One with novelist and former Pitch Perfect winner, Suzy Aspley and the other with thriller writer A.A. Chaudhuri. So, what are you waiting for? Grab yourself a cuppa and settle down for a good old read!

Hello, and welcome to the March issue of our newsletter! Spring has finally sprung – we hope you’re enjoying the brighter weather after what feels like a very long winter. In this issue, we’re sharing some news and taking a closer look at our spring book club selection. We’re also treating you to an interview with spotlighter Adam Oyebanji and a special My Bloody Scotland from Kate Foster. So, put your feet up and get ready for a great read!