Callum McSorley on Lockdown and leg work – finishing the trilogy

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

Ten good questions by Alex Gray

Whenever I am talking to students of creative writing about researching a novel, I ask them to consider the following. Rather than poring over the internet or even reading lots of books, both practical ways in themselves, try going out to find experts on the subject that you want to research armed with ten good questions. My own experience tells me that I might come home afterwards with twenty answers and several great stories.

One novel that stands out to illustrate this is the fourth in my Lorimer series. I wanted to begin my story with a body being pulled out of the river Clyde, only I could not envisage just how this was carried out. A friend suggested that I seek the help of the Humane Society officer, George Parsonage MBE, and so I was introduced to him and visited his home in Glasgow Green. There, I not only saw photographs of the very process that I had in mind but heard many tales of rescues and others of fishing dead bodies from the depths of the river and made a good friend. George was a fascinating character, so much so that he agreed to be himself in the story and the book was entitled The Riverman, a nickname that George had been given. The authenticity of the setting brought the book to the attention of major publishers as well as composer, Ken Walton, who used some words from it for his choral symphony Colours of the Clyde. And all because I had gone out to seek a real person in my research! George and I have been friends to this day.

Before the advent of mobile phones, I would go out armed with a notebook and camera, photographing places and jotting down my first impressions. Being out and about in, for example, the city of Glasgow also gives one the added benefit of sensory information. I might hear sirens in the distance, the roar of traffic, sounds of local dialect, smells from street food markets and all sorts of things. My very first novel, Never Somewhere Else, is set in Glasgow’s art world and I will be forever grateful that I managed to take photographs of Glasgow School of Art and set down my detailed observations of its former glories. Who could have guessed that this gem in Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s crown would suffer two horrific fires decades later? 

My dear friend, the late Alanna Knight, had a mantra; walk the paths and touch the stones, she would say, and it was sound advice that I follow to this very day. Going out to talk to experts in their field and seeing what really happens in their world is invaluable source material. I have been fortunate to enjoy a good relationship with the police ever since I first wrote to Sir John Orr back in the 1990’s, asking for help to research a crime novel. Coming from a position of not knowing anything about police procedure and being invited into police stations then divisional headquarters was a fascinating start for this wannabe crime novelist.

My latest novel, Questions For a Dead Man, took me to Tulliallan, the police training college, thanks to the co-operation of senior officers in Police Scotland. I was invited to attend on the day of the cadets’ passing out parade, but before that I was given a talk on so many aspects of the training plus advice on how my character, Daniel Kohi, might proceed in his career. I watched my own video clips many times but actually being there and watching the parade, listening to the chief constable address the new recruits, was pure gold for this crime writer. Much of what we write is fiction, of course, but having research like this adds so much authenticity to a story and readers are forever saying how much they enjoyed the setting of different books, surely a testament to my methods. 

It is no mistake that ideas will spring from encounters with other people on visits like this. I can recall several times when a plot centred on a tiny thing that I found as I was looking for material. Not just ten answers and some good stories, but sometimes the very hinge upon which a plot might turn! Best of all, I now count several experts amongst my good friends, a lasting legacy that is even more satisfying.

Questions for a Dead Man by Alex Gray, (Sphere, £16.99) - the 20th book in the Lorimer series.

When a prominent MSP goes missing, DSI William Lorimer wastes no time in investigating. Robert Truesdale was fronting the controversial campaign to legalise drugs in Scotland, and his enemies were numerous. With every passing day, the chances of finding him alive grow slimmer. Then the worst happens. A car bomb explodes in a nearby village, and the blackened body pulled from the wreckage appears to be Truesdale's. Yet there are details that don't add up and soon Lorimer is questioning whether the victim was all he claimed to be. Lorimer calls on the assistance of his friend, PC Daniel Kohi, who has infiltrated a local gang as part of a police initiative to crack down on drug-related crime in Glasgow. As their investigation draws them into the dark heart of Glasgow's criminal underworld, Lorimer and Kohi discover that danger is everywhere and nobody is as they seem.

More information about Alex Gray and her books can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @Alexincrimeland.

Anna Smith - from investigative journalist to crime writer

As a frontline daily newspaper journalist for more than twenty years, I encountered at first hand dozens of characters that could have walked into any crime novel.

From Glasgow hard men ruling their criminal empires, to Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries on the streets of Belfast; from gangsters living the champagne life on the Costa del Sol, to young female heroin addicts propped up in shop doorways selling their bodies for sex. Throw in a few dodgy cops and lawyers and you’ve got a raft of material that might make a novel. 

I worked at the Daily Record for more than 20 years – ten of them as Chief Reporter, travelling the world to cover conflicts from Rwanda to Kosovo. So many of the stories and the harrowing cruelty I witnessed have stayed with me, so whenever I’m writing about the struggle of refugees fleeing their homeland, I can call up so many haunting images. 

It was these images and memories of my days as a reporter that compelled me to embark on my first series of crime novels, featuring the Rosie Gilmour character, a gritty Glasgow journalist who tears down the walls of corruption to get her story in the newspaper. 

When you write from your own experience like that, basing the character on many of your own traits, you are forced to expose yourself in ways you wouldn’t have to when you are reporting for a newspaper.

Although writing fiction was a departure from what I did as a reporter, I wasn’t really fazed by having to create a character a bit like myself—though not exactly like myself, I should stress! I write as honestly as I can, and I hope it comes across in my novels. 

The method of creating the Rosie Gilmour novels had to be different from a police procedural crime novel, where the objective of the story is to nail the criminal and put him/her behind bars. But for a journalist, the procedure is to investigate the story, follow the leads, gather the evidence, and finally expose the perpetrator on the front page of the newspaper. I approached each novel as I would a newspaper investigation, only the aim here was to create a work of fiction that would resonate with readers.

I rested Rosie for a bit to shift into the gangland genre and created a reluctant woman gangland boss in the shape of Kerry Casey, who takes over the reins of her Glasgow crime family. I really enjoyed the characters who walked into these novels and have been delighted at how popular this genre is. 

My latest series features Glasgow ex-female cop turned private eye, Billie Carlson, who’s half Swedish, half Glasgow-Irish, with a haunted backstory that makes her a desolate kind of figure. The novel is told in the first person, so I hope it pulls the reader in from page one. I’m really enjoying exploring the characters Billie meets as she takes on a case, and she doesn’t always use conventional practices. She has her own moral code that doesn't always match the police's. Billie is her own woman and if she thinks the end game is worth pursuing, she will always do it her way.

Until I Find You by Anna Smith (Quercus Books) Out Now.

When you've lost everything, you'll stop at nothing Billie Carlson left the police force under a cloud. Once a promising young officer she now works as a private investigator, rooting out insurance scams and spying on cheating spouses. One morning a distraught young woman comes into her office saying that her baby has been stolen. Her story seems unbelievable, yet something about her makes Billie want to help - Billie knows what it's like to lose someone too. To get to the bottom of the case Billie must rattle some dangerous cages and rely on old police friends for inside help. Soon she discovers a network of crime deeper and far more twisted than she ever could have imagined. But is she in way over her head?

More information about Anna Smith and her work can be found on her website. You can also find her on Twitter @annasmithauthor You can also find her on Facebook.

Alan Parks on The Three Things I’ve Learned in My Short Crime Writing Career.

 

One. Don't Put Song Lyrics in Your Books.

The first draft of my first book Bloody January was awash with them. The Rolling Stones singing 'Paint It Black' on McCoy's car radio. A glimpse of Marc Bolan shimmying his way through 'Metal Guru' on someone's black and white TV in the corner of their living room. A young guy putting a five pence into a pub jukebox and dancing back to his pals as the opening bars of 'Alright Now' by Free blasted out. All good stuff I thought. A quick and easy way to give a sense of atmosphere and the particular time the book was set in.

But. That was until I found out you had to pay to put them in. And it costs a lot. Having worked in the music industry for twenty years, this may have crossed my mind, you may think. It didn't. Shows how much attention I was paying in those long marketing meetings. 

Consequently, Bloody January has 'House of The Rising Sun' in it now. And that's it…. 

Two. Swearing Drives Some People F*cking Nuts. 

Again, call me naive but I thought someone who chose to read a book set in the grimy and violent world of early seventies Glasgow might not be too concerned with a bit of ribald language. How wrong I was. 

One of the fun things you get to do as an author is meet book groups who have been reading your book. I always enjoy this, it's nice to hear what people think, and let's be honest it gets you out the house for a change. When it breaks up people often stay behind to have a personal word. Tell you their Gran lived in the same street as McCoy, that they love Wattie. Again, very nice. 

But. There is always someone who asks you with a pained look on their face. 'Do you really have to put so much swearing in the books?" Two things immediately cross your mind. One, you should have seen the first draft before the editor took half of it out. And two. Yes, I do. 

It always amazes me that no one ever objects to a scene of someone getting their fingers broken one by one, or being tied to a chair and repeatedly stabbed in the face but the minute the psychopath doing so and doing so with relish, utters the word f*ck, all hell breaks loose… 

Three. Research Will Fail You. 

I pride myself on being pretty diligent about trying to get things in the books as accurate as possible. I check old Yellow Pages to make sure a certain off-licence was open at the time the book was set. I interview people about boxing matches in the Govan Town Hall in 1973. I get my friend Stevie who is a criminal lawyer to check I've not used any non-Scots Law legal terms. 

But. There are always ones that slip through the net no matter how hard you try. Murray and McCoy have a conversation next to a motorway works. Motorway works that weren't started until the next year. A murder victim gets on a number 47 bus. Which wouldn't transport her to her grisly demise. 

I remain calm in these situations, smile nicely at the person who is 'kindly' pointing it out to me, and repeat in my head. 'It's the story that really matters not these kind of details…’

The April by Alan Parks (Cannongate) Out Now.

In a grimy flat in Glasgow, a homemade bomb explodes, leaving few remains to identify its maker. Detective Harry McCoy knows in his gut that there’ll be more to follow. The hunt for a missing sailor from the local US naval base leads him to the secretive group behind the bomb, and their disturbing, dominating leader. On top of that, McCoy thinks he’s doing an old friend a favour when he passes on a warning, but instead he’s pulled into a vicious gang feud. And in the meantime, there’s word another bigger explosion is coming Glasgow’s way – so if the city is to survive, it’ll take everything McCoy’s got . . . 

Books to Look Forward to from Cannongate

January 2019

Bodies are piling up with grisly messages carved into their chests. Rival gangs are competing for control of Glasgow's underworld and it seems that Cooper, McCoy's oldest  gangster friend, is caught up in it all. Detective Harry McCoy's first day back at work couldn't have gone worse. New drugs have arrived in Glasgow, and they've brought a different kind of violence to the broken city. The law of the street is changing and now demons from McCoy's past are coming back to haunt him. But vengeance always carries a price, and it could cost McCoy more than he ever imagined. The waters of Glasgow corruption are creeping higher, as the wealthy and dangerous play for power. And the city's killer continues his dark mission. Can McCoy keep his head up for long enough to solve the case? Bruised and battered from the events of Bloody January, McCoy returns for a breathless ride through the ruthless world of 1970s Glasgow.  February’s Son is by Alan Parks.

April 2019

Things in Jars is by Jess Kidd. London, 1863. Bridie Devine, the finest female detective of her age, is taking on her toughest case yet. Reeling from her last job and with her reputation in tatters, a remarkable puzzle has come her way. Christabel Berwick has been kidnapped. But Christabel is no ordinary child. She is not supposed to exist. As Bridie fights to recover the stolen child she enters a world of fanatical anatomists, crooked surgeons and mercenary showmen. Anomalies are in fashion, curiosities are the thing, and fortunes are won and lost in the name of entertainment. The public love a spectacle and Christabel may well prove the most remarkable spectacle London has ever seen. Things in Jars is an enchanting Victorian detective novel that explores what it is to be human in inhumane times.

June 2019

The Way of all Flesh is by Ambrose Parry.  The only difference between a medicine and a poison is the dosage.  Edinburgh, 1847. City of Medicine, Money, Murder.  In the city's Old Town a number of young women have been found dead, all having suffered similarly gruesome ends. Across the city in the New Town, medical student Will Raven is about to start his apprenticeship with the brilliant and renowned Dr Simpson. Simpson's patients range from the richest to the poorest of this divided city. His house is like no other, full of visiting luminaries and daring experiments in the new medical frontier of anaesthesia.  It is here that Raven meets housemaid Sarah Fisher, who recognises trouble when she sees it and takes an immediate dislike to him. She has all of Raven's intelligence but none of his privileges, in particular his medical education.  With each having their own motive to look deeper into the city's spate of suspicious deaths, Raven and Sarah find themselves propelled headlong into the darkest shadows of Edinburgh's underworld, where they will have to overcome their differences if they are to make it out alive.

Sleepless in Glasgow

At Shots Ezine we’re always looking out for interesting debut novels, and though not a debut novel as such, ‘The Dead Won’t Sleep’ is Anna Smith’s debut crime novel and one to look out for if you enjoy tough urban noir. Following the journalistic traditions of fellow Scottish crime-writers Val McDermid and Tony Black, Anna Smith has been a journalist for over twenty years and is a former chief reporter for the Daily Record in Glasgow. She has covered wars across the world as well as major investigations and news stories from Dunblane to Kosovo to 9/11. She writes a regular newspaper column in the News of The World with a readership of more than a million in Scotland alone. The Dead Won't Sleep is the first thriller in a series featuring crime journalist Rosie Gilmour.

The body of a young teenage hooker is found washed up on the beach near Glasgow. This stark event barely captures a headline in the cynical world of tabloid newspapers. This is Glasgow in the 1990s and she’s just another dead heroin addict. But Tracey Eadie was only fourteen years old and came from a children’s home in Glasgow. How did she get from there to where she is now? One of Tracey’s friends on the street contacts Rosie Gilmour, a tabloid journalist. She gives Rosie a tip off that’s dynamite, too hot to print but impossible to ignore. Rosie has covered many dark stories in her career. Her background has plenty in common with Tracey’s and her own life could have gone either way. Her investigation exposes a sordid tale of corruption and child abuse that leads from the murky streets of Glasgow to the very top of the establishment. For Rosie, it is the only story worth telling, but she soon discovers that the forces united against her will stop at nothing to make sure nobody ever gets to the truth.

The Shots team met up with Anna Smith in Holborn’s Chancery Court Hotel last night together with award-winning writer / critics Laura Wilson and Natasha N J Cooper thanks to the Quercus Publishing team, who have published the worldwide bestsellers of Stieg Larsson and John Ajvide Lindqvist.

Over cocktails we discovered that Anna has seen the reality of the dark side of human nature, witnessing as a journalist the very worst mankind can offer, and she said while covering the Rwanda genocide, she still can smell of death and decay and it rests uneasily in her memory, so perhaps the title ‘The Dead Won’t Sleep’ is an apt title. She has recently been reading up on the crime-fiction genre listing her favourite writers being James Crumley, Harlan Coben and was very enthused by Noah Boyd’s debut ‘The Bricklayer’. Her inspiration to introduce Rosie Gilmour in her first outing, is due to her first-hand knowledge of the havoc that the Heroin epidemic caused in Glasgow and seeing the effects as a journalist made her focus that period into a dark narrative.

Anna credits strong encouragement from her agent Ali Gunn as well as her editor, the legendary Jane Wood for steering her toward writing a crime-fiction series, and one that would have an appeal beyond the dark streets of Glasgow, and the trail of shared heroin syringes.

Read More about Anna Smith’s ‘The Dead Won’t Sleep’ and other upcoming books from Quercus Publishing here and the launch party here

We know that we’ll be hearing a lot more from Anna Smith’s Rosie Gilmour novels as they probe the dark side of human nature, and provide insight; which is what a journalist does when faced with the shadows in reality.

Photo © 2011 Ali Karim ‘Anna Smith at The Pearl Bar in Holborn’s Chancery Court Hotel’