Peter Ritchie on why he writes

Like so many others I’m often asked why I write and where did it come from. I have to go back to my roots to explain this and I’ll go on to describe how Grace Macallan came to be.

I was born into a deep-sea fishing community, the child of generations of men who earned their living on the water and many of them served in the Royal Navy during times of conflict. So, from a very early age I was listening to stories often dominated by loss or great drama, and my own great grandfather was lost with all of his crew in a terrible storm. As a child I was fascinated by books and coming from such a tight knit community they exposed me (at least in my imagination) to so many other words and lives. At the tender age of 15 I went to sea which meant growing up quickly and there were no favours even from those men from the same community. The work was so hard, endless hours on exposed decks and weeks away from home. Apart from working and sleeping there was nothing much else to do apart from reading. On the long trips to the fishing grounds and back I devoured books and I often think that’s where I carried on with my education such as it was. After 8 years at sea I decided I wanted to see something else of the world and joined the police.

So, I entered another community of storytellers in the force. Cops love to tell stories and of course why wouldn’t they given what they see in the course of their job? After 3 years I moved into criminal investigation and never put a uniform again for the rest of my career.  During my time as a detective I saw so much that could have turned me against the human 

race, but at the same time witnessed some incredible acts of humanity that in a couple of cases changed me as a person. I had started to write poetry (not that well) and liked to draw and paint on the rare occasions I had time off and the idea of writing was developing. Looking back there was no way I could have done it at the time and still dealing with the job I was doing. I worked on murder squads for many years and then moved into specialist work with a covert surveillance team. During the following years I moved into intelligence work in London and several years in Holland and during these periods I worked on numerous cases involving the death of sex workers and trafficked women. The plight of those women stays with me and in all the books I’ve written there’s always a character who is a sex worker or trafficked in some way. In book 3, Shores of Death, which comes out in June I really bring out some of my previous life as there are fishing boats used for trafficking women so clearly my experience comes out in the writing. The ideas were starting to form for a fictional story but I had made up my mind I would have to wait till I was finished with the job.    

When the time came I sat down at the computer and all I had was this idea about a detective lying in the road after being hit by a car. I wrote it as a prologue and still had no idea what was coming next. So, I just let my imagination take over - I had spent several years working in Northern Ireland and there I was imagining a scene in the Ormeau Road, the location of some terrible events during the Troubles. Then Grace just appeared and became the central character in all of the books.

I suppose writing crime fiction lands you in a big pool with some particularly big fish and the question is what do I bring to the table? I try to make the books authentic as far as possible in a few hundred pages. By authentic I mean the way the characters interact whether it’s the criminals or the investigators. Grace is very human, like all of us she’s flawed and makes mistakes. She’s no super sleuth and like me and so many other detectives looks at what she sees and just becomes more confused about what it all actually means. I’m also very keen to bring in the smaller characters who get caught between the law and the opposition and not mentioned enough in most fiction in my humble opinion. So, there are all sorts in the books who play significant roles. I’ve mentioned the sex workers and the trafficked women plus there are small time dealers, minders and in Shores of Death even a pimp’s dog gets quite a good role! I also try to reflect what modern detectives have to deal with in that the stories take place on quite a wide canvas. So Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle and Belfast are all linked in various ways and in the book I’m writing just now Dublin turns up in a few scenes. Although there is a serial killer in the first book I go for other issues in the later books to reflect what happens in the real world. I think there are more than enough serial killers around in crime fiction as it is!

So Grace is alive and well and good for another few cases yet I think.

Talking Artefacts of the Dead with Tony Black

Credit - Dan Phillips

Ayr doesn't have a Starbucks.

The birthplace of the poet Robert Burns has, however, come a long way from the days when the ploughman poet was the talk of the 'Auld Toun'.

No longer the bucolic little hamlet with the odd thatched roof to mark stops on the Burns' heritage tours, Ayr has grown up.

To say this was a surprise to me would be the understatement of my life. I grew up in Ayr. Sleepy old Ayr, 'where ne'er a toon surpasses for honest men and bonnie lasses' as our most famous resident noted.

It was, then, a place where weekenders flocked from Glasgow and the surrounds to take the prom' with an ice cream or a poke ay chips. It was sleepy, uneventful. And boring beyond belief to my teenage self; I couldn't wait to get out.

Edinburgh, Dublin and then Melbourne became stops on the extended escape route. I moved on, giving little thought to what I'd left behind. It was a shock then, on returning two years ago, to discover that the old home town did not look the same.

Ayr doesn't have a Starbucks. But it now has just about everything else - including a campaign to bring the coffee behemoth to the town; Ayr folk want it all now, everything they'd been denied for many a long year, and they're not backward about asking for it.

A by-product of this rush to modernity is some of the less welcome traits of a town on the up, with its eye on city status.

Ayr has all the problems it once had: rebellious teens drinking in the street, a scuffle after match-day, road rage in the supermarket car park. But, the Auld Toun also has some decidedly nastier social ills altogether.

The first thing that struck me on my return home was the massive increase in the visible markers of social problems. Beggars, comatose junkies lying in heaps in shop doorways, car windows smashed and the contents ravaged. In the big city these become the wallpaper to everyday life, you hardly notice them. But in Ayr ..?

The town had changed and not only on the surface. The crime being recorded in the local newspapers was of an altogether harder core, too. Gangland beatings; smuggling and drugs offences; post-office and jewellers raids and murder. As a crime writer, I took note.

When bad things happen in good places, as I knew from setting six crime novels in Edinburgh, an extra layer of intrigue is added to the mix. People don't expect the worst from such locations, and when it does occur, it hits hard.

The Irish crime writer, of whom I'm a huge fan, Ken Bruen put it in another way, when talking about the changes - post Celtic tiger - he'd noticed in his home town of Galway: "I wanted to wait until we had mean streets to set a novel in Galway, and boy, we had them now."

I can't say - as Ken did - that it was ever my ambition to set a novel in my home town. If you'd suggested the notion to me a few years back, I'd have found it laughable. But if you'd said the country I lived in would crash so dramatically and we'd be swept into austerity measures worse than the immediate post-war years, in the blink of an eye, I'd likely have laughed too.

That's the thing about seismic shifts, rarely do we see them coming. If we did, we'd batten down the hatches and prepare for them. At least get ready and try to ride them out in reasonable fashion; but when massive change happens so fast, all you can do is adapt and at best, interpret the new landscape.

Artefacts of the Dead opens with the discovery of a body. A banker has been impaled on a wooden spike near Ayr's communal waste ground. The spike has entered where the sun doesn't shine and exited, trailing blood and viscera, through the abdomen creating a scene that is both stark and shocking to residents of the Auld Toun.

As the investigation gets underway, what would once have been a high-profile case for the Glasgow murder squad, is kept in-house by an ambitious Chief Superintendent. That investigating officers are overstretched as it is doesn't seem to matter. There is, after all, DI Bob Valentine - an officer recuperating from a near-fatal stabbing to the heart - who can be brought back into the fold.

The murder investigation becomes Bob's last chance to re-establish himself. His spirit has

been broken by his stabbing, and the way his family has reacted to his near-death experience - but he now feels keenly how fragile life is.

Bob is a man ill at ease in the modern world, confused by what has happened to his town, on his watch, and plagued by a nagging guilt to make things better. The outside world has become an alien place to him; he feels a stranger in a strange land.

As the pressure, and the body count, mounts Bob begins to question his abilities. When the physical limitations of his recovery - and a weakened heart - lead to blackouts by day and sweat-soaked nightmares by night, he wonders if he has started to lose his mind.

The town of Ayr soon demands answers, a media frenzy threatens to have the case handed over to the Glasgow murder squad, but Bob's options are running out. The one hope he has of solving the case comes in the form of a tenuous lead to a similar, though unrelated, case from the past.

Can the earlier disappearance of the schoolgirl Janie Cooper provide the clues to solve the Ayr murders that are plaguing Bob's days and nights? He hopes so, because the little girl in the missing posters seems to be following him around - it might be the only way to recover his sanity.

Artefacts of the Dead is published by Black & White Publishing, price £7.99 and is available as paperback and eBook 14^th July.

For more info' visit: www.tonyblack.net