CRP's Blog

With Tartan noir picking up on the dark trends left in the wake of Scandinavian crime fiction, T. Frank Muir makes waves with his gory police procedural, the fifth in his series with hard-boiled detective Andy Gilchrist. Muir discusses how the rainy town of St. Andrews, Scotland inspires his books for the brooding lawman.

It seems surreal somehow, but I’m now about to publish number five in my crime series set in St. Andrews, after that tentative step into authorship when the first of my DCI Andy Gilchrist novels came to life in 2007. But the idea for setting a crime series in that picturesque seaside town had come to me many years earlier.

If you’ve never been to St. Andrews on the east coast of Scotland, you must. Internationally famous for being the home of golf, and nationally renowned for being the town in which Prince William attended university and met his wife, Kate, St. Andrews is one of these rare old Scottish towns that appears to have marched through time with barely a change to its historical heart. No question, the place is awash with pubs and restaurants that attract many a foreign tourist into the old gray town or, as it is colloquially known, the auld grey toon, but it was not the pubs that sparked the idea of my crime series but the historical and, yes, romantic setting.

Its castle ruins, its cathedral ruins and cemetery, its harbors, its pier, its golden beaches and black cliffs overlooking blacker seas, its old terraced houses built from stones stolen from the cathedral in bygone years, its cobbled streets and narrow pends all give any visitor to the old town a sense of being somewhere special. That spark of inspiration came to me one winter’s night when I stopped midstep and stared along a centuries-old cobbled street before me, with shadowed houses either side, and realized that this—St. Andrews—would make a terrific setting for a crime series.

I often market and publicize my books as being the first and only contemporary crime series set in St. Andrews, but it recently dawned on me that the only St. Andrews constant throughout the books is the North Street police station, which is where my fictional detective, DCI Andy Gilchrist, works each case. On reflection, I now understand the significance of that police station—the fact that it is only a two-minute walk to the nearest pub and how that location has defined Gilchrist’s character and turned him into the man he has become in my novels. Although he struggles with a sense of failure, having failed in his marriage, seeming never to sustain a long-term relationship with the fairer sex, and struggling to keep in contact with his grown-up children, he often ends up in one of the local pubs discussing the case with his team or analyzing forensic data or strategizing their next move.

I now see that a novel’s setting is not chosen just to provide the author with an attractive place about which s/he can write; it is also a useful tool that the author can use to develop her/his main character. Regrettably, the North Street police station was recently closed, with the constabulary moving to a more modern building in a quiet residential area that seems as if it is an hour’s walk to the nearest pub. Would my DCI Gilchrist be the protagonist he is if the North Street police station had not been so close to the center of that wonderful old Scottish town? I have to confess that I very much doubt it.

Not for the faint of heart, The Meating Room follows DCI Andy Gilchrist and DS Jessie Janes as they follow a string of gruesome crimes connected to Thomas Magner, a wealthy property developer they believe to be guilty of killing his business partner, and of so much more. Magner has a rock-solid alibi, and only the two detectives can discover the horrifying secrets that lay beneath. The mogul is on trial for a series of alleged rapes three decades earlier, with 11 women prepared to face him in court. But leads go cold as the business partner’s death is ruled a suicide and one by one the women remove their testimonies. When one of the accusers is found brutally murdered, Gilchrist and Janes unearth the tycoon’s murky past. Could Magner be responsible for atrocities more disturbing than anyone could have imagined?

The Meating Room will be published by Chicago Review Press on April 1, 2017. For more information on Frank and his writing, visit www.frankmuir.com.