Reading Peace, Writing Granite by Nina Allan

‘As they left the Highbury pitch that afternoon, as the sporting men of Fulham shook their hands, slapped their backs and wished United luck, the very best of luck, Bobby had his head bowed, he did not speak, a few folk even said he looked distraught, though they could not think, not fathom why, why would he look distraught? United were in the final of the Cup, the FA bloody Cup, doesn’t get much better than that now, does it, Bobby lad? Come on, Bobby, smile, why don’t you smile? You scored a goal, you’re in the Final!’

My mother remembered Munich; she was fourteen when it happened. I first learned about the crash from when she happened to mention it to me, years ago. I have forgotten exactly what she said, but I know she talked about the Busby Babes, about the tragedy of what happened to Manchester United. The odd England game aside, my mother is not a football person, never has been. But she remembered Munich. 

On the afternoon of February 6th 1948, the plane carrying the team home from their European Cup fixture against Red Star Belgrade crashed at the end of the runway at Munich airport. Of the forty-four passengers on board British European Airways Flight 609, only twenty-one survived. Of the twenty-three who died, eight were Man United players. The team’s manager Matt Busby was so badly injured he took months to recover. 

At the time of the Munich Air Disaster, David Peace’s father, Basil Dunford Peace was in London studying to be a teacher. He attended the match United played and won against Arsenal at Highbury the week before. He judged it the greatest game he’d ever seen. Though Basil Peace was always a Huddersfield Town supporter, it was the Babes he talked about. When his father died in 2022, David Peace set aside the book he had been working on and began to write Munichs, a novel of the crash and of its immediate aftermath, a novel about football but also – equally, tellingly – about grief.

British society after the war was slow to change. Deferential and still massively class-bound, it was a society in which the traditional hierarchies of family, church and community were strongly upheld. In Munichs, the second world war is still tangibly close. The older men – the football managers, the sports journalists – have fought in the war. Some of them have fought in two. Bobby Charlton and his friend Duncan Edwards are still doing National Service. All the young players are encouraged to learn a trade – bricklayer, builder, plumber, sparks – in case football doesn’t work out. The idea of taking their game into Europe is still very new, and they feel nervous about venturing ‘behind the Iron Curtain’. More than one of the boys who ended up on that flight would have preferred to stay at home. 

Peace evokes a world in which it is still not unusual for only one house on the street to have a telephone, where families sit anxiously around the radio, waiting for news. Where women – especially working class women – are really only expected to be wives and mothers. Where young lads who’ve just been in an air crash are expected to be out on the pitch winning matches just a fortnight later. 

When you look at photos of Matt Busby’s team, what hits you in the gut is just how young they were. Several of those who died were barely in their twenties. Those who survived received no trauma counselling. They were not encouraged to talk, even by their families, about what had happened to them. And once they were home there were the match-day chants, shouts that they ‘should have died at Munich’, accusations that they were burn-outs, selfish for standing in the way of fresher talent. Jackie Blanchflower and John Berry, who survived the crash but who were too badly injured to continue in the game, were quickly asked to vacate their subsidised flats in order to make way for the players who would replace them.

There are intimations in Munichs of the increasingly commercial route football would follow. Even before the crash, Manchester United were sneered at for being ‘Hollywood United’, a team more interested in big names, big money and foreign travel than the home game. Matt Busby was criticized for taking the team into Europe in the first place. 

In some ways, what happened at Munich represents a dividing line between the 1950s and the 1960s. The more open, socially permissive era that followed the disaster promised greater freedom and openness but less security and fewer certainties. Less emphasis on moral values, more on getting ahead. It is a harsher time, a more ruthless time, and not just in football. Is it fanciful to suggest that Munich is where Thatcherism begins? Worth remembering that Thatcher was selected as the Conservative candidate for Finchley in April 1958, just two months after Munich, that she was elected to parliament less than eighteen months after that? 

There has to be something in this, at least for a writer. And for a writer the story of Munich is not all about Man United. Eight journalists as well as eight footballers were killed in the crash – a horrible symmetry – men who had known each other for longer than most of the players had been alive. In the world of sport they were famous. The funeral of Henry Rose, the most-read football columnist the Daily Express ever had, was bigger even than Duncan Edwards’s or Tommy Taylor’s. When these men died, whole lifetimes of knowledge and memory went with them, gaps that could never be filled and that marked the end of an era in British sports writing. 

There is also the broader question of what caused the crash. The inquiry into the accident went on for years, undermined by disagreements and conflicts of interest between British European Airways and the German airport authorities. The pilot, James Thain, was a former RAF officer and an experienced flyer. Thain, who had just turned thirty-eight at the time of the crash, was subjected to an ongoing barrage of vitriol hurled at him by the press and by a public who were desperate for someone to blame. BEA sacked him two Christmases later, anxious to cover their backs; the German authorities were determined from the outset that Thain was at fault. It took him ten years to clear his name. He died of a heart attack not long afterwards, aged just fifty-four.

I could spend a lot of time reading and thinking about this bitter aftermath. A large part of my passion for true crime literature is in my hunger for knowledge, an obsession with the question of what really happened. Munichs though is not so much an investigation as an exhumation, an evocation of a time as viewed through the lens of a single event. The novel captures the language and texture of a grief that is both national and personal, personal not just for the fans and families of Manchester United but for Peace himself. A means of replaying his father’s memories, reimagining the effect of those headlines, that heartbreak, the abysmal sense of shock. Of bringing his father back to life, even. A way to continue with a conversation that had been cut short. 

Peace’s present tense narrative rolls in a slow wave between crash survivors and the victims’ families, shellshocked staff on the ground at Old Trafford, newspaper reporters, doctors, older players coaxed back to the game by a desperate management, teenage reserves hurriedly brought on side. Hostile supporters of rival teams, keyboard warriors before their time. Taxi drivers, grieving brothers, even a monk. And of course the Dead, who haunt Peace’s account from its opening pages. Everyone has their own version of what happened at Munich. Some have more than one, hence Munichs plural, though that is not the only meaning of the novel’s title. 

Peace never feels the need to use elevated language. As a potter constructs a miracle from humble red clay, so Peace achieves poetry through paying attention to the sound and rhythm of ordinary words. The language heard on the street or down the pub. Of tabloid headlines, the cliches of condolence, the gulf that exists between what is spoken and what is felt. You hear this novel as you read it: the voices of the regions, the heft and weight of sentences, the way words work harder and divulge more secrets when they are put together in a particular way. 

Munichs is as much a piece of music as it is a novel, a battery of half-rhymes and assonance achieved through Peace’s habitual, repeated process of reading aloud. A symphony of sorrowful songs, a hymn to all of the Dead, including his dad.

I kept reading around David Peace before I actually read him. I remember seeing him on the 2003 Granta list and feeling drawn to what he was saying about how fact works in fiction. About how his first books had been inspired by the years-long, error-strewn hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. I have always been interested in true crime for its detailed evocations of particular memories, of particular times and places. I remember also the feelings of guilt and uncertainty I used to have around reading it. True crime was sensationalist and exploitative, the stuff of tabloid newspapers. It was OK to read Crime and Punishment and talk about how it was really a crime novel but reading about real murders was somehow taboo. At least if you were serious, at least if you had taste. 

Then I read an interview with Peace that upended my thinking and ultimately changed my direction as a writer. Speaking in 2010, Peace described the crime genre as ‘the perfect tool to understand why crimes take place, and thus tell us about the society we live in and the country we live in and who we are.’ I had heard similar arguments before, but Peace went further, saying that he was ‘drawn to when writers take on history, take on real crimes. There’s just so much that happens in real life that we don’t understand, that we can’t even fathom. I don’t really see the point of making up crimes.’

I remember feeling electrified when I read that. Peace was writing densely textured works that embodied the vision and freedom to experiment that fiction offers, but that were tied to experiential reality in a way that made them even more powerful. I felt energized and inspired. I was beginning to think in a new way about what I wanted to write. At the same time I felt deeply uncertain about whether I was truly capable of this kind of writing. Whether I could bring anything new to the table. Whether I could do justice to my subject matter. 

Neither could I help noticing that the field of work I was becoming interested in was dominated by men. Macho, in-your-face men like Norman Mailer and Peace’s own literary idol James Ellroy. James Ellroy is about as far from British self-deprecation as you’re going to get. But he has the goods to back up his words and in the end that’s all I care about, the quality of the writing. If Ellroy feels OK comparing himself with Beethoven then good on him, because he’s not far wrong. I wish I had his nerve. 

I have since come to realise that my uncertainty had less to do with not being Norman Mailer than with not being ready. I didn’t feel I had the technical ability and I was probably right. I took the slow way round, feeling my way towards stories that made sense for me to tell, pushing the envelope of my abilities with each new thing I tried. When I finally came to write A Granite Silence it still felt like a risk, the most difficult and challenging project I had yet attempted. But I had come to a point where I sensed I might be capable of solving the problems the book presented, and where the writing itself – the words on the page – stood a chance of reaching a standard I felt I could live with. 

I had arrived at the moment where the risk felt not just possible, but necessary.

In the autumn of 2021 I travelled to Liverpool to meet up with a friend I hadn’t seen in person since before the first lockdown. Just being in the city put me on a high. Rain fell heavily the night before I headed home again, and when I went to catch my train I discovered that the West Coast Main Line was partially flooded, that all services heading north were severely delayed. I was told to take a train to Preston and await further instructions. 

“What happens when I get to Preston?” I asked. No one could tell me, because nobody knew. When I got there the scenes I encountered were predictably insane. Trains arriving and disgorging hundreds of passengers with nowhere to go. People sweeping in tides from platform to platform as rumours of trains that might get us into Scotland flared up, spread like wildfire and then guttered out. The one that finally arrived had limped all the way from Plymouth. By the time it turned up in Preston it was three hours late. I crammed myself into a luggage stand, fenced in by people’s knees and a couple of bikes. As we crossed the border at Berwick-on-Tweed an announcement crackled through the overhead speakers that all passengers were now obliged to put on their masks. The woman sitting next to me – I’d managed to grab a seat just after Newcastle – asked me if I’d managed to catch what they were saying. She’d been on the train since Birmingham. I reluctantly broke the news. 

“Jesus!” she groaned. I told her if she didn’t feel like complying with Scottish law that was fine by me. We’d all been breathing each other’s air for several hours in any case. I was exhausted. I was increasingly pessimistic about making the last ferry. But what I remember most about that journey is reading David Peace’s 1980 and 1983, in a breathless six hours of immersion that were still ongoing. And how strange it was, that I was passing through the places I was reading about: those hard-nosed northern moorlands and back-to-backs, streaming past beyond the windows in a reel of silent film.

From the Redbeck car park back into Castleford – 

Silence in the black of the back of the van – 

Dim lights down black back roads – 

Sat in the back of the black of the van – 

Yorkshire, 1972:

You’ll wake up some morning as unhappy as you’ve ever been before. 

When David Peace started work on 1974 he did so with the youthful ambition to write the best crime novel ever written. That the Red Riding novels have become classics proves the strength of that ambition, though Peace now feels ambivalent about the first movement of his quartet. Perhaps he feels that it does not stray far enough from the roots of the genre. But whilst it is true that some of those roots are showing – Derek Raymond, Ted Lewis – how could it be otherwise? When you first start writing you’re lucky, not to mention talented, if anything you produce is entirely yours. Peace had written earlier, unpublished novels before finding his true direction, grounding the story he wanted to tell in the Yorkshire of the seventies and early eighties, a time that coincided with the beginnings of his desire to write and that in some sense formed it. 

He brought to it also some of the kitchen-sink sensibility of the previous generation of northern writers, whose novels he had been introduced to through his father’s book collection: Stan Barstow, who lived just a few streets away from Peace in his hometown of Ossett; Alan Sillitoe, who as well as being a novelist was also a poet. And there was something else too, something extra: the gritty, poetic rigour that marks Peace’s own style, a confidence around his material that increases as the sequence moves forward. 

The material by itself is challenging enough. Peace’s portrait of a corrupt and increasingly beleaguered police force offers none of the familiarity and consolation of traditional detective fiction, and few writers have come anywhere close to confronting the traumatic effects of violence and poverty as Peace has done. In terms of story, the Red Riding novels are masterpieces of ambiguity. But what makes these books truly groundbreaking is their insistence on being more than a story, on being words on a page. Peace’s language becomes increasingly codified, more condensed, so close to poetry in places there is really no difference. The language of 1983 especially gains a kind of transcendence, hammering the page like rain on windows, staining the paper like mould. 

You can feel it being written.

I first read TS Eliot’s The Waste Land in English class when I was fourteen. I count myself as lucky. I would bet the farm – if I had one – that they don’t teach Eliot now. My mother has always loved poetry. She used to read it aloud to me throughout my early childhood, and so I had the advantage of being familiar with how poetry works. I think even at fourteen I knew instinctively how to read The Waste Land, which I recognized as a country of the imagination as much as a symbolic portrait of the postwar landscape. 

I was so excited by what I read it made my heart race. I felt angry and frustrated with my classmates, who did not get it, who kept flipping back and forth between the text and the notes at the end, trying to discover the poem’s ‘meaning’ from references they had no hope of understanding. I didn’t understand the notes either – they were too esoteric, notes from a bygone era even then – but I knew enough to know that I didn’t need them. There was something happening between me and the words, and that was enough. I was discovering phrases and cadences and – more even than that – a way of looking at language that was to become the central strand of my writer’s DNA. 

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

There was something about Eliot’s images that made my teeth chatter. Over in my German class I was coming to know the stories of Wolfgang Borchert, who had worked with similar raw material, even though his register of language and lexicon of references are very different. I began to understand how one work of literature could inform another. Storming through Red Riding forty years later I became convinced that Peace must have experienced a similar epiphany. That mental thrill, which is also visceral. The narrowing of the gap between the thought and the word.

As an adolescent, Peace harboured a secret fear that his father might be the Yorkshire Ripper, that his mother might be the Ripper’s next victim. What is any writing but the stuff you are most interested in or obsessed by? Ideas you keep having. Stories you keep noticing. Ambitions that won’t keep quiet or go away.

Finding a path towards your material can be a tortuous process. I had ambitions to write a novel based around true events for most of ten years before I found myself at work on A Granite Silence. It happened almost without my realizing it – as I describe in the novel itself, the story I had set out to write was very different. Allowing aspects of that story to keep resurfacing became essential to the narrative as it developed.

Every novel is a set of problems waiting to be solved. Paying attention to how other writers have solved their problems may not help you solve your own – the problems you have will be different, or should be – but it should at least hold out the hope that a solution is possible. David Peace’s work continues to speak to me directly. The chord it first struck was so powerful it has never died away. 

A Granite Silence by Nina Allan (Quercus Publishing) Out Now

A Granite Silence is an exploration - a journey through time to a particular house, in a particular street, Urquhart Road, Aberdeen in 1934, where eight-year-old Helen Priestly lives with her mother and father. Among this long, grey corridor of four-storey tenements, a daunting expanse of granite, working families are squashed together like pickled herrings in their narrow flats. Here are Helen's neighbours: the Topps, the Josses, the Mitchells, the Gordons, the Donalds, the Coulls and the Hunts. Returning home from school for her midday meal, Helen is sent by her mother Agnes to buy a loaf from the bakery at the end of the street. Agnes never sees her daughter alive again. Nina Allan explores the aftermath of Helen's disappearance, turning a probing eye to the close-knit neighbourhood - where everyone knows everyone, at least by sight - and with subtlety and sympathy, explores the intricate layers of truth and falsehood that can coexist in one moment of history. Full of echoes, allusions and eerie diversions, A Granite Silence is an investigation into a notorious true crime case, but also a stylish, imaginative inquiry into who gets to tell a story, how it is told, and why.

Nina Allan is a highly acclaimed and inventive novelist and short story writer, whose work has won multiple prizes including the Novella Award, the British Science Fiction Award and the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire for Best Translated Work. A Granite Silence won the prestigious CWA Historical Dagger Award and was long-listed for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. More information about Nina Allan can be found on her website.

Crime Writers’ Association Announce 2026 Dagger Winners

 

The winners of the prestigious 2026 Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Dagger Awards, which honour the very best in the crime-writing genre, have been announced.

Created in 1955, the world-famous CWA Daggers are the oldest awards in the genre and have been synonymous with quality crime writing for over half a century.

The awards were announced on 2 July at the CWA gala dinner at De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms, London.

The coveted KAA Gold Dagger, sponsored by Kevin Anderson & Associates, which is awarded for the best crime novel of the year, went to Abigail Dean for The Death of Us, a haunting literary thriller that examines how a violent crime reverberates through a marriage over decades. Dean transitioned from a successful legal career—including working as a lawyer at Google—to become one of the UK's most acclaimed contemporary thriller writers.

S.A. Cosby, the only author to be shortlisted for an unprecedented three Dagger awards, took home the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, which honours the best thriller of the year, with his book, King of Ashes.

Cosby is one of the most celebrated crime writers working today, regularly praised by Barack Obama in his Books of the Year selections, known for blending fast-paced noir thrillers with sharp explorations of race, class, masculinity, and life in the modern American South. He worked in construction, retail and security, writing on the side, before breaking through with the acclaimed novel, Blacktop Wasteland. 

King of Ashes, is a Southern Gothic crime epic inspired in part by The Godfather. The novel combines family drama, organised crime, revenge, and long-buried secrets.

Nadine Matheson, Chair of the CWA, said: “It is a genuine pleasure to congratulate every winner of this year's Daggers. The range and quality on display are a reminder of just how much vitality there is in crime fiction and how it continues to push at its own boundaries, and this year's winners are leading that charge. Congratulations.”

Nina Allan received the Historical Dagger for A Granite Silence, an atmospheric mystery that uses the disappearance of a young girl in 1930s Aberdeen to explore memory, truth, and the stories communities tell themselves about tragedy. Nina made a name for herself in the Science Fiction genre, but her literary thrillers cross categories and have been highly praised by critics.

The Twisted Dagger for psychological suspense went to Sarah Pinborough, for her haunting Gothic novel, We Live Here Now. Pinborough is best-known for her New York Times bestselling breakout novel (and hit Netflix show) Behind Her Eyes. We Live Here Now was praised for its eerie atmosphere and signature Pinborough-style ending.

The Whodunnit Dagger for books with an intellectual challenge at the heart of a good mystery, sees Mel Pennant take home the award for A Murder for Miss Hortense. 

A playwright, screenwriter, and novelist A Murder for Miss Hortense is Pennant’s breakthrough novel featuring the sharp-witted Jamaican-born retired nurse living in Birmingham who investigates a murder. The book was praised for combining a compelling mystery with a warm portrayal of the Windrush generation and Caribbean-British life.

The global reach of the genre is showcased in the Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger. Finland’s Antti Tuomainen came top in a hotly contended category, with The Winter Job. Tuomainen is one of Finland's most internationally acclaimed crime writers, often described as the "King of Helsinki Noir" and dark comedy. His translator David Hackston, is also recognised in the award, which is sponsored in honour of Dolores Jakubowski.

The ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction was awarded to Susannah Stapleton for That Dark Spring. 

Stapleton is a historian specialising in uncovering forgotten stories from the early twentieth century, particularly women’s stories. That Dark Spring is an absorbing true-crime mystery that reopens the unsolved 1929 death of an eccentric British artist in Provence, revealing a world of secrets, rivalries, and unanswered questions.

The Daggers are one of few high-profile genre awards that celebrate the short story. This year’s recipient of the Short Story Dagger goes to Ambrose Parry for The Apple Falls Not Far. Ambrose Parry is the joint pen name of Scottish crime novelist Chris Brookmyre and his wife, former consultant anaesthetist Marisa Haetzman.

The Dagger in the Library, voted for by librarians, recognises authors whose bodies of work have resonated with readers over time. Tim Sullivan took the accolade in a stellar shortlist that included Paula Hawkins, Clare Mackintosh, Freida McFadden, and Abir Mukherjee.

An accomplished television writer-director, Tim Sullivan reinvented himself as a bestselling crime novelist through the hugely successful DS George Cross mysteries, combining classic detective fiction with a distinctive neurodivergent protagonist.

The CWA Daggers are also known for providing a platform for emerging talent, with the much-anticipated ILP John Creasey First Novel Dagger and the Emerging Author Dagger competition, sponsored by Fiction Feedback; over two dozen past winners and shortlisted debut authors have signed publishing deals to date. 

The Emerging Author Dagger went to Michael Nikitin for Blind Side of the Sun.

 

Laura McCluskey received the Creasey First Novel Dagger with The Wolf Tree. The Australian writer, editor, actor and filmmaker worked across theatre and film, before becoming a novelist. The Wolf Tree is an atmospheric crime thriller set on the fictional Hebridean island of Eilean Eadar, partly inspired by her Scottish family heritage and research into Scottish folklore.

The Best Crime and Mystery Publisher category recognises the publishers behind the genre’s success. The respected independent publisher Bitter Lemon Press beat heavyweights including Faber & Faber, Pan Macmillan, No Exit Press and Simon & Schuster to the award.

Founded in London in 2003 by François and Frédéric von Hurter and Laurence Colchester, Bitter Lemon Press specialises in bringing award-winning crime, noir, mystery, and thriller novels from around the world into English, often through new translations.

The CWA Diamond Dagger, sponsored by Karen Baugh Menuhin, is awarded to an author whose crime-writing career has been marked by sustained excellence, is announced in early spring and in 2026 was awarded to Mark Billingham.

Mark Billingham said: “I could not be more thrilled or honoured. To be added to a list that features most of my literary heroes is fantastic.”

The winners in full:    

                                  

CWA KAA Gold Dagger

The Death of Us by Abigail Dean (HarperCollins/Hemlock Press)

Ian Fleming Steel Dagger 

King of Ashes by S. A. Cosby (Headline)

ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 

That Dark Spring by Susannah Stapleton(Pan Macmillan/Picador)

Historical Dagger

A Granite Silence by Nina Allan (Quercus/riverrun)

Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger

The Winter Job by Antti Tuomainen (Orenda Books) translated by David Hackston

Whodunnit Dagger

 A Murder for Miss Hortense by Mel Pennant (John Murray Press/Baskerville)

Twisted Dagger

We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough (Orion Fiction)

ILP John Creasey (First Novel) Dagger

The Wolf Tree by Laura McCluskey (HarperCollins/Hemlock Press)

Short Story Dagger

‘The Apple Falls Not Far’ by Ambrose Perry (Canongate)

Emerging Author

Blind Side of the Sun by Michael Nikitin

Dagger in the Library

Tim Sullivan  

Best Crime & Mystery Publisher

Bitter Lemon Press

Diamond Dagger

Mark Billingham

 

Bute Noir 2023 Programme Announced

 

FRIDAY AUGUST 4

5.30-6.30 Bute Yard

The Rest is History: Abir Mukherjee and Ambrose Parry

Meet two – or is it three – of the most entertaining writers of historical crime at work today. Abir’s captivating Wyndam and Bannerjee series, set in 1920s India, has an army of fans. Ambrose Parry, better known as Chris Brookmyre and Marisa Haetzman, returns with the brilliant Voices of the Dead.

7.00-8.00 Bute Yard

Pyscho Thriller: Fiona Cummins, Stuart Neville, and Luca Veste

A twisty session with three fine writers who like to mess with your head. Fiona’s new novel All of Us Are Broken is breathtaking; Stuart’s The House of Ashes is haunting and thought-provoking; Luca’s You Never Said Goodbye is an electric thriller with real heart.

8.30-9.30 Bute Yard

Val McDermid and Mick Herron

Spend an hour in the company of two of the best in the business. Val is firmly established as the Queen of Crime and her Karen Pirie series was a huge TV hit last year. Mick’s superb Slough House spy series is a TV smash on Sky as Slow Horses starring Oscar-winner Gary Oldman. 

10.00-11.00 Bute Yard

LATE AND LIVE: Red Hot Chilli Writers Podcast with Special Guests

Authors Abir Mukherjee and Vaseem Khan bring their hilarious podcast to Bute; late, live and dangerous. Expect the unexpected as a line-up of special guests submit to whatever mad scheme, game or quiz that these two fiends dream up to entertain you.

SATURDAY AUGUST 5

11.30-12.30 Bute Yard

The Long Arm of the Law: Claire Askew, Neil Lancaster, Marion Todd

Meet three experts in the art of the police procedural. There are now five books in Claire’s award-winning DI Birch series; Neil Lancaster’s Max Craigie series has stormed the book charts in the last few years; while Marion’s DI Claire Mackay series has gained a deserved army of fans.

1.00-2.00 Bute Yard

Science fact: Lin Anderson and Elly Griffiths

Two authors with a forensic eye for detail and two much-loved, long-running series. The Wild Coast is the 17th novel featuring Lin’s forensic scientist Rhona Macleod, while Elly’s forensic anthropologist Ruth Galloway says a sad farewell in The Last Remains.

2.30-3.30 Bute Yard

Science Fiction: Doug Johnstone and Christopher Priest

Award-winning crime writer Doug has turned his hand to science fiction for the first time with The Space Between Us, while leading sci-fi author Christopher has penned the classic The Prestige, and the much-anticipated new novel Airside.

2.30-3.30 Bute Museum

Blood Still Fresh: Ann Bloxwich, Heather Fitt, AJ Liddle, Christie J Newport

Meet four new(ish) authors who are making their mark in the world of crime writing. Ann Bloxwich’s second novel, Goodnight, God Bless sees abusers become victims; the killer in Heather Fitt’s The Flight is 30,000 feet up; AJ Liddle’s No Way Back is a thriller set in Georgia. Christie’s debut The Raven’s Mark has received the highest praise.

4.00-5.00 Bute Yard

Second Chances: Denise Mina, Liam McIlvanney, and Louise Welsh

Three of Scotland’s finest novelists in any genre get together. Denise’s new novel The Second Murderer features Chandler’s legendary detective Phillip Marlowe in 1920s LA. Liam’s The Heretic, set in Glasgow in the 1970s, is the follow-up to the prize-winning The Quaker. Louise’s The Second Cut is the long-awaited sequel to her astonishing debut, The Cutting Room.

4.00-5.00 Bute Museum

Elly Griffiths Children’s Event

A special event aimed at older primary school children and featuring Elly Griffiths’ acclaimed A Girl Called Justice series.

5.30-6.30 Bute Yard

Mark Billingham and Liz Nugent

Two outstanding authors who have created two memorable new characters. Mark’s first new series for 20 years features the eccentric Detective Miller in The Last Dance, while Liz’s latest offbeat creation is the wonderfullyStrange Sally Diamond.

7.00-8.00 Bute Yard

Not Your Average Crime Novel: Nina Allan, Rachelle Atalla, Susi Holliday

Three writers who are continually trying to push the boundaries of the crime novel. Nina Allan’s Conquest is a triumph of imagination and humanity; Rachelle’s Thirsty Animals is a terrifyingly plausible yet speculative thriller; Susi’s startingly original The Street is a creepy mystery.

9.00-10.45 Bute Yard

The Fun Lovin Crime Writers

The world’s #1 crime writing superband will rock the stage of Bute Yard, murdering songs for fun. Val McDermid, Mark Billingham, Chris Brookmyre, Doug Johnstone, Stuart Neville and Luca Veste come armed with new songs and old jokes, and are sure to get you dancing, and rocking in the aisles.

SUNDAY AUGUST 6

12-1 Rothesay Library

A Little Bit of History Repeating: Vaseem Khan, Anna Mazzola and Douglas Skelton

A trip back in time with three superb historical crime writers. Vaseem ’s Death of a Lesser God is the fourth in his Malabar House series; Anna’s The House of Whispers is set in Rome; A Thief’s Justice is the second in Douglas’s Jonas Flynt series.

1.30-2.30 Rothesay Library

JD Kirk and Johnny Shaw

We present two natural storytellers. Scotland’s JD Kirk has sold over two million copies of his Jack Loganseries, and his new book is the explosive In Service of Death. Award-winning American novelist Johnny Shaw’s latest in the UK is The Upper Hand, a brilliantly wild heist tale.

3-4 Rothesay Library

Heidi Amsinck, Myra Duffy and Alex Gray

Two festival favourites and a newcomer from Denmark. Alex’s Questions For a Dead Man is the 20th book in her DSI Lorimer series. Heidi’s The Girl in the Photo features violent attacks on the streets of her native Copenhagen. Myra’s latest Bute-set novel is Dead Drop at Bute Circus.

4.30-5.30 Rothesay Library

Glasgow Gone By: Gordon J Brown and Robbie Morrison

Two crime writers who’ve set terrific novels in 20th Century Glasgow. Gordon’s thrilling No More Games sees 12-year-old Ginger pursued by a gunman and a criminal in 1974. Robbie returns to 1930s Glasgow for his new Jimmy Dreghorn novel Cast a Cold Eye.

A Murder Close to Home by Nina Allan

Shortly after breakfast on the morning of July 2nd 2018, my partner and I set out from our home on the Isle of Bute, driving along the coast road in the direction of the ferry crossing at Rhubodach, the ‘wee ferry’ that links the north end of the island with the mountains and extensive forests of the Cowal Peninsula. We were off to spend a short holiday on the Isle of Arran, and with the whole day at our disposal we had decided to take the longer and more scenic route via Portavadie and Tarbet, making landfall at the sheltered port of Lochranza with its imposing ruined castle. Scotland and especially the west coast is infamous for its unpredictable weather – returning to Arran in May 2021 we were not as surprised as we might have been to see her highest mountain, Goat Fell, adorned with an impressive crown of snow – but this July morning was luminously bright and clear. 

We were excited to be making this trip. Since relocating to western Scotland the year before, this was to be our first visit to our neighbouring island. I was in particularly good spirits; after more than a couple of false starts, I had just finished the first complete draft of the novel that would eventually become The Good Neighbours, a mystery surrounding a familicide on a Scottish island. We were in plenty of time for the ferry and were looking forward to a leisurely morning’s drive. What we were not expecting was to have our way blocked by police cars. As we approached the junction between Shore Road and Ardbeg Road, a woman officer flagged us to a halt and asked us where we were headed, before directing us on to the lower coast road and away from the junction. We glimpsed two more police cars, a number of officers gathered together in a huddled group. We noticed in particular the police tape, sealing the entrance and driveway of a nearby house. 

It barely seems credible now, given what had taken place, but we actually made jokes about this at the time, laughing about how the cops must have had to send away to the mainland for the scene-of-crime kit. The Isle of Bute is a remarkably safe place to live. People here really do still leave their houses and cars unlocked when they go to the shops. A recent incident in which a pensioner had his wallet snatched saw locals apprehending the culprit and delivering him to the police station. The idea that a major violent crime might have taken place here did not cross our minds. The sight of police cars and police tape were disturbing and discomfiting, but if I suspected anything it was a private tragedy: a suicide, or possibly an elderly resident found dead from natural causes, alone at home. Such saddening but low-key events do not always make the local papers, and I doubted we would ever discover anything more. We continued along our way, the matter receding from our minds with every mile. By the time we boarded our third ferry at Claonaig we had stopped talking about it. 

This was soon to change. Shortly after we arrived at our guest house in Brodick, I received a text from a friend in Manchester, asking if I had heard any more details of what had happened on the Isle of Bute; our obscure and northerly island had made the national news. I checked the media feeds on my phone, searching for more information, and quickly learned that a six-year-old girl, Alesha MacPhail, had been reported missing from her home – the same house we had seen cordoned off by police tape as we drove towards the ferry crossing four hours earlier. The news reports gave away little, stating only that ‘an extensive police search’ was already underway. It was not until a couple of hours later that the police released their statement: Alesha’s body had been found by a member of the public, in woodland less than a mile from where she had been taken. 

As the initial horror began to sink in, I noted how the police did not appear to be making any attempt to stop or question people leaving the island, a fact that seemed to suggest they already had a suspect in view – not a tourist, not a random killing, but someone who lived on the island with nowhere to run to. And so it proved; just days later, as we were returning home, an arrest was made. Alongside the initial relief that the killer had been found came an increased sense of horror and disbelief: the arrested suspect was just sixteen years of age. 

On the streets of Bute, that sense of horror and disbelief was palpable, and ever-present. I will never forget the strange atmosphere of those first days and weeks following Alesha’s death, the odd hush over everything, the knowledge that every person you met in the street or at the butcher’s or in the Co-op was preoccupied with the same thoughts, the same subject. I have experienced this form of group consciousness, this shared awareness of history a few times in my life – Margaret Thatcher’s fall from power, the death of Princess Diana, 9/11 – and the sensation it produces has always been similarly destabilising, on the edge of the uncanny, as if, through those electrically charged moments, a deeper layer of reality has been revealed. 

In the case of Alesha MacPhail, the overwhelming sensation was one of grief, and of impotent anger. The murder happened at the height of the tourist season, and alongside the stunned locals, visitors to the island – many of them children visiting grandparents, just like Alesha – played in the sun and by the water. It was good – a relief – to see people behaving normally, yet at the same time the sense of unease was difficult to dislodge, the sense that those children might not be safe anywhere, or never entirely.

We had to wait a further eight months until the trial before we learned the full extent of the horror that had befallen Alesha MacPhail and her grieving family: how a young psychopath had previously fantasised about committing such a murder, how he then, in open court, tried to blame another, completely innocent person for his own appalling actions before finally confessing his crimes to a police psychologist and declaring himself ‘quite satisfied with the murder’. But even before then I felt so affected by what had happened that I briefly considered abandoning work on The Good Neighbours. With a real murder so close to home, the idea of inflicting a similar trauma even on invented characters seemed questionable. I was especially concerned by the possibility that anyone reading the book and most especially anyone who knows the island might assume the novel’s events had been directly inspired by the tragedy that took place on Bute in the summer of 2018. With the crime still so recent and still so raw in the memory, the idea of utilising it as a basis for fiction seemed inappropriate to me.

On further reflection, I decided it would be wrong of me not to finish what I had started. The Good Neighbours is a book I had been trying to write for some years, and I am proud of how it turned out. I proceeded with my work in the full and certain knowledge that not only had I completed the first draft before the murder took place, but that the actual inspiration for my novel lay in an entirely unrelated crime that took place half a century ago, five hundred miles to the south of where I now live. 

And yet the book was changed, nonetheless. In ways I could never have predicted, certain scenes – the scenes of mourning in particular – became inflected, suffused with the peculiar atmosphere of those first days following the murder of Alesha MacPhail. The quietness in the streets, that strange hush. And then there was the heat, above all the heat. The shadowy pallor of northern nights, charged with off-kilter magic and a dangerous restlessness, when there is light in the sky even at midnight, and with the heat of the day cooling to an amethyst shimmer, the sense of a world apart, a time removed. 

I completed the manuscript with a deeper love for the island that is now my home, as well as a renewed awareness of the importance of taking responsibility for the stories we choose to tell. I passionately believe in the power of crime fiction – for examining social division and personal trauma, for asking questions about the society in which we live and how it might be improved. But in posing such questions and examining such situations we must take care not to neglect the trauma experienced by victims, the devastating impact of violence in the real world. Crime stories are not just stories. Details matter. 

The Good Neighbour by Nina Allan (Quercus Publishing) Out Now.

Cath is a photographer hoping to go freelance, working in a record shop to pay the rent and eking out her time with her manager Steve. He thinks her photography is detective work, drawing attention to things that would otherwise pass unseen and maybe he's right . . . Starting work on her new project - photographing murder houses - she returns to the island where she grew up for the first time since she left for Glasgow when she was just eighteen. The Isle of Bute is embedded in her identity, the draughty house that overlooked the bay, the feeling of being nowhere, the memory of her childhood friend Shirley Craigie and the devastating familicide of her family by the father, John Craigie. Arriving at the Craigie house, Cath finds that it's occupied by Financial Analyst Alice Rahman. Her bid to escape the city lifestyle, the anxiety she felt in that world, led her to leave London and settle on the island. The strangeness of the situation brings them closer, leading them to reinvestigate the Craigie murder. Now, within the walls of the Craigie house, Cath can uncover the nefarious truths and curious nature of John Craigie: his hidden obsession with the work of Richard Dadd and the local myths of the fairy folk.