Bloody Scotland, 14th September 2024

Bloody Scotland, 14^th September 2024

I don’t go out much. When I usually do it involves watching Celtic and getting drunk. That’s Bloody Scotland for you. But this was a different kind of outing. Bloody Scotland inspired by William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw. Labelled the Godfather of Tartan Noir, the Glaswegian detective didn’t as much solve a crime as solve the world with his philosophical musings. Over the weekend of Friday, Saturday and Sunday, The Festival brought together those who write crime fiction and those who read it. This was its thirteenth outing. Bob McDevitt, the festival director, offered me a three-minute-reading slot ‘In the Spotlight’.

‘In the Spotlight’ as the name suggests brings the untested and unknown authors to Stirling and gives us a chance to showcase our work—in my case Beastie—before a sympathetic audience. My spot was before Irvine Welsh and Louise Welsh, who were being interviewed by Stephen Jardine. It was at 8.30pm, which gave me plenty of time to the get to the Albert Halls, even if I’m liable to make a circle out of a right turn.   

I had to be the Albert Halls for 8.30am for a rehearsal of my reading. I made it, but I was so harried I’d left home with the front-door key in an unlocked door. I only found this out later when I arrived home around 1am on Sunday morning and patted myself down like a sober drunk and couldn’t find my key.  

Stirling combines the old such as Stirling Castle and the new such as the University. Albert Halls combined both. The architecture was medieval as a Shanks toilet, but it had a box office and bar and stage with a screen and the participants were wirelessly connected and could speak directly to an audience that catered up to 700 seated. When I was ushered into the Halls, the other Spotlight authors were onstage clutching the start of their published novel they planned to read.

There was an over our head debate between Bloody Scotland board members and volunteers Catriona Reynolds and Gordon J Brown about whether Donna was due to turn up Saturday or Sunday. Donna turned up as they were speaking.

Gordon J Brown took us novices through our pieces. His accent was that of the middle-class to whom everything comes easy, but having read his novel No More Games, I suspect his roots were in Castlemilk, and nobody in that scheme speaks like that or there’d be harsh words about talking funny.

He sat in the audience and timed us. He advised Donna, for example, to knock a minute or two off her reading.

I later found out, she was an old hand at Bloody Scotland. She blogged for the Festival and even created her own book festivals. But this was her first reading, ‘In the Spotlight’.

Like most novices. I hooked up with Donna and those in the know, especially when I admitted I hadn’t got a lanyard which identified me as an author.

Donna led fellow authors Isobel Shirlaw, Claire Wilson and me down the road to the Green Room in the Golden Lion. Green rooms aren’t necessarily Green. The Green room in the Albert Halls, for example, is tacky as 1970s disco floor and the furniture comes from the same era. With nobody about, I yanked open the fridge door. Disappointingly, there was nothing in it but a cheesy smell. But I came equipped like a tourist from a cruise ship with juice and my cheesey sandwiches. I  added nothing to the local economy’s finances. But Bloody Scotland, I’d guess, brings in around 2000 to 3000 visitors.  

 When I signed in, the receptionist at The Golden Lion asked who I was paired with? When I told her Louise Welsh and Irvine Welsh she said, ‘I looked a bit like Irvine Welsh’.

I replied, ‘All bald men look the same’. But already I was looking beyond her, to fill up on free coffee and biscuits. If there’s a gift horse, I’ll eat it.

I got chatting with the Bloody Director, Bob McDevitt. He’d sweeping black hair that spoke of boy bands and karaoke at the Curly Coo. ‘Irvine Welsh,’ I’d said, ‘had got the golden ticket, like Charlie at the Chocolate factory.’

Bob recalled his gilded youth. He’d been a bookseller in Edinburgh. When Trainspotting came out, he said it had a hideous cover, but slowly word-of-mouth sales got it noticed. It was a virtuous circle, where everything that could go right about writing and marketing combined.

Trainspotting was like a Babushka doll. Welsh alluded to that later that night. He never touched that level of success for a novel that sold one million copies in Britain alone. And, course, there was the iconic film starring Ewan McGregor.

Louise Welsh’s debut novel, The Cutting Room, followed a similar trajectory but on a lesser scale. It won pretty much every award, and remains the work she is most cited for.

I asked her where she got the name for the protagonist in The Cutting Room, Rilke?

‘A fifty-pence book,’ she said.

Pick-and-mix choices, often my favourite kinds of books.

I’d only been half-listening to the others onstage at rehearsals. I’d a sheet of crumpled paper in my lap. And I’d already timed it. I knew it was three minutes. I stood at the podium and looked out at the audience that wasn’t there and got through it. My fellow authors congratulated me. We all congratulated each other. We were all adept fictional liars.

‘I can see why they put you on with Irvine Welsh,’ Isobel Shirlaw said.

‘Nah,’ I replied. ‘Just luck.’

Gordon took us backstage and up to the bookshop. Waterstones had our books on display. I’d brought a very large rucksack. Like Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains, his protagonist had fled England after having sold only ten poems. I also expected to flee by Stirling by train humping the fifteen novels on display back to Clydebank.

Gordon Brown told us, ‘You’ll be fine.’ He recounted a story he’d no doubt told to prevous Spotlighters. Ian Rankin had been the author sitting where we’d be sitting. And the queue had wound up and around the bookshelves. When the first buyer had put his book down for Ian Rankin to sign, he’d refused.

‘Have you bought one of the Spotlight author’s?’ he’d asked.

After that the Spotlight author’s books sold as well as Rankins. That act of worker solidarity appealed to me, but that was then. I suspected I wouldn’t be as lucky.   

Irvine Welsh is the kind of big name that non-readers recognise and his views on Scottish Devolution make the front page of the Daily Record.

Irvine Welsh might have been the biggest pull with the Festival’s online audience, but for bums on seats Ann Cleeves in conversation with Lin Anderson filled not just the main hall but the balconies. Around seventy-percent women.  That reflects the reading public. I sat and chatted on the bench outside with an old biddy, as the queue wound up and past us. Her legs couldn’t take the standing.

Gossip is a valuable currency. The wee squat bouncer, for example, that ushered us pensioners inside had a long day that finished the next day at 3am. He had a qualification in stage management, which never helped anyone, and a medical certificate that didn’t put him on the sick, but allowed him to practice first aid. Bouncers no longer bounced.

His later gig was at the nightclub in the town. It was full of middle-class twats, he told me, and young girls that went to University and got drunk on a Breezer. By my reckoning, he’d be on his feet for over fifteen hours.  Hard work, doing nothing.

A former headmaster asked me if I’d spoken this morning. I got a bit confused, thinking he’d been at the rehearsal. ‘Aye,’ I said.

But it wasn’t me he was talking about. I was used to that being recognised as someone else. He described how the author had provoked a visceral reaction. The aftermath of a man that had shot himself. His father, he said, suffered from what would now be described as post-traumatic-stress disorder after finding that man’s body in Tiree.

His son was a sports journalist. No doubt he’ll be writing a best-selling novel about it.  Many of the bestselling authors appearing that day were former journalists or worked in media: Frank Gardner, Chris Hammer, CS Robertson, Steve Cavanagh and Peter May. Abir Mukherjee namechecked Val McDermid, former journalist and queen of crime fiction.   

I asked him what the scores were? My phone cost less than a tenner and does phone calls and text.

‘Which team?’ he asked.

He didn’t have a phone either, but his friend in the queue did. He harrumphed and shook his head at such a ridiculous request.

Planners vs Pansers debate. People like me, who don’t plan a novel and prefer to write by the seat of their pants, often end up with longer stories hovering around the 30,000-40,000 word mark that don’t seem to go anywhere. There is some consolation. Steve Cavanagh claimed to have the same problem with his latest blockbuster.

A compromise between the two. We can always fall back on Hilary Mantel’s premise that like divine providence, sometime we’re just not equipped to deal with the ideas we’re chasing—it’ll come later, when we’re ready. Inspiration will follow the clichéd writer’s perspiration.  

Or we could just keep writing the same book again and again, like Enid Blyton, who wrote 10 000 words a day. I’d a conversation with about that with a fellow festival goer as we took a walk around the car park between events. She told me where she was from. It was somewhere like Iceland, but she’d a bit of an Irish lilt in her voice. Perhaps Vikings had abducted her. They used to do a roaring trade in Irish women and children. She was telling me I should go to a fine-arts event in Orkney, which made me smile. We talked about Samuel Pepys’s diaries. Which led to how every book we read when we were wee was written by Enid Blyton. Every jumble-sale had about three or four on sale. Her take on it was they were no longer politically correct. Even the dog’s bark was middle-class woofter. The villains were swarthy fellows, which meant working class like me.

‘Do you think she ever met working class children?’ she asked.

‘Nah,’ I replied.

I reminded her that even Shakespeare had to do a bit of arse licking to perform his plays.

She seemed to have intimate knowledge of the gossip in London. We both scoffed that Charlotte Owens, the thirty-year-old advisor to Boris Johnson had been somehow appointed as the House of Lord’s youngest peer on merit. That would be like the moron’s moron Trump appointing former Playboy model Karen McDougall to the House of Congress. But she told me something I didn’t know. The former press officer of the little trumpet, Carrie Johnson was raging with Zac Goldsmith, who was the father of her child, not Boris Johnson. All the old Etonians knew this, but there were super-injunctions to stop the rest of us yokels from finding out what a rotter both men were. Enid Blyton would be appalled. She’d have blamed a passing gypsy fellow. She’s be lost for words, of course, if the baby had been black (see a wonderful short-story The Black Madonna by Muriel Spark) but less so if it had been carved out of bog oak.   

There was a William Hills I’d passed walking to Stirling Castle. Statues of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. Steep gradients leading up to the castle. But the English outnumbered us and we fought guerrilla wars, much like in Ukraine. I’d a daft mate, Burnsie. He stabbed himself with a Samurai sword while mucking about. I guess we weren’t supposed to laugh.  

My mate Andy Rat texted to give me an update on the fitba results. He’s not interested in books. Neither is my partner or any or my mates. I guess they wonder why I’m wasting my time. I sometimes wonder that too. Reading is what I do. I guess writing too.

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