In 2020 I was living in Inverurie
in Aberdeenshire, in lockdown with my wife – who as a paediatrician continued
to work through the pandemic – and my then one-year-old son. To get him to nap
I would roll him about in his pram in the garden then get a little writing done
while he was parked up snoozing.
On
our one allowed trip outside, I would take him around the neighbourhood, often
down to the flood plain – an expanse of untamed grass and wildflowers by the
River Urie – where there was a nice walk.
This
part of the Urie isn’t particularly wide or deep, more a burn than a river, so
it was a laugh to spot a group of young lads trying to row down it in a dinghy
one day. Lockdown was getting to us all by then, I guess.
Not
the only mad thing people were getting up to. I read a story online about drug
dealers using their allotted exercise hour to meet customers in parks, dressed
in jogging gear as cover. With plenty of people on furlough, business was good.
This
stuck in my head. I even pitched a story to my agent inspired by it, but this
was in 2021 and she rightly pointed out how uncertain the future still was. It
would be hard to see the end of the book when we didn’t really know what was
coming just weeks and months ahead of us. So it went into the kitchen drawer in
my brain like the one where you keep all the random cables, bits of twine, corn
on the cob holders, (flat?) batteries, tea towels printed with pictures of
Cliff Richard… The usual shite.
And
as with the ideas which became my previous two books – Squeaky Clean (2023),
about a car wash worker who ends up cleaning more than just cars when gangsters
take over the business, and Paperboy (2025), about a confidential waste
technician selling secrets to cover his gambling debts – it took a few years
for me to get back to it.
Jump
forward to 2024. My debut Squeaky Clean had come out the year before and won
the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year and so I’d begun
working on a trilogy starring Squeaky’s star copper, Alison ‘Ally’ McCoist (“Glasgow’s
least popular detective”), who bungles and scraps her way through
investigations causing plenty of mess and mayhem along the way. The middle
part, Paperboy, was finished and with my publisher, coming out in March the
next year, and it was time to bring the whole thing home.
But what to write about? Squeaky Clean was inspired by things I’d squirrelled away from the years I worked in a car wash as a student, Paperboy by nuggets of information smuggled from my pal who worked in confidential waste disposal. And this was when the idea churned back up to the top of my head: lockdown, parks, drug dealers.
Stars
aligned – I was awarded the Loch Long Crime Writing Residency at the incredible
artists’ retreat Cove Park in Argyll, so in the autumn of 2024 I drove to its
idyllic surrounds, put myself in lockdown again and began writing what became Rat Race, my third book and the final part of the McCoist trilogy:
Fran
Forbes is sixteen and leaving school. He’s a quick lad, a sharp-minded
entrepreneur. Some people might call him a drug dealer. Whatever, he’s just
secured a couple of kilos of top-quality nose hair dandruff and is about to
take a big step up the career ladder. BUT (there’s always a but) it’s March
2020. Lockdown. He’s holding jailtime amounts, he owes big returns.
Not
stymied for long, he reasons “the market’s still there – it’s distribution
that’s the problem” and has a good idea: he’ll use his government sanctioned
outdoors time to meet customers in parks. Fran runs all over Glasgow, covering miles
and miles. He gets a taste for it, the running. More than that, he’s good at
it. Competitive good. Before long he’s doing marathons, winning sponsorships
and leaves the crooks of Glasgow behind.
BUT
(see?), the dream doesn’t last for long. Where chapter one picks up, it’s 2026
and Fran’s knees are, according to the doctor, “fukt”. He wants to travel to
the US for an operation by a specialist and that is going to cost a whole lot
of readies.
Again,
Fran won’t be stymied for long and he has another good idea: he goes back to
his former boss and agrees to one last job in exchange for enough money to sort
out his injured gams.
If
you want to find out how that works out for him (probably well, you might
guess), Rat Race is out now.
Rat Race by Callum McSorley (Pushkin
Press) Out Now
DCI Alison McCoist is up to the
oxters in Glasgow's shadiest police unit, with a list of guilty secrets growing
longer by the day. Fran Forbes has just bolted from the scene of a gangland
massacre with only a shite-stained tracksuit and a memory stick full of
cryptocurrency to his name. Ally is tasked with looking into this latest
underworld rammy and ends up working with some bampots even dodgier than her
polis pals. Can she keep Fran from being turned into mince by a Russian OCG and
finally free herself from the fankle of police corruption she's caught in? An
enemy from Ally's past is determined her story won't have such a happy
ending...
More information about Callum
McSorley can be found on his website.
Callum McSorley can also be found on Instagram at @callumrmcsorely on Facebook
@callummcsorleyauthor
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