By THIRSTY
Malcolm Mackay lives on a remote
island off the western coast of Scotland and yet has managed to become an
award-winning force in the “tartan noir” genre. Short-listed for international
awards, including the Edgar, the CWA Dagger and the Theakston Old Peculier
Crime Novel of the Year, his book, How a
Gunman Says Goodbye, won the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year.
Stay
Thirsty Magazine was pleased to visit with him at his home in
Stornoway for these Five Questions about his craft.
STAY THIRSTY: In your newest novel, For Those Who Know The Ending, you use Glasgow, Scotland, as a principal
setting. As a life-long resident of the Isle of Lewis, an island off the
western coast of Scotland in the Outer Hebrides for those not in the know, and
the town of Stornoway, with a population of about 8,000, how did you manage to
find your way to becoming an award-winning crime novelist on the international
literary scene?
MALCOLM MACKAY: It started with reading, as it always does. I was a
huge fan of writers like Jim Thompson and Dashiell Hammett and that influenced
what I wanted to write. I was fascinated by the idea of normal people doing
terrible things, people choosing to follow a dark path just because easy money
lay along it. I put together my first manuscript, made my way through my agents
slush pile and found myself with a publisher. I’ve never been particularly
tempted to write about familiar surroundings, I think it’s more important to
push your own creativity and learn as you go along. Write about what you want
to know, not what you already do.
STAY THIRSTY: Before For Those
Who Know The Ending begins, you list 28 characters, with a brief thumbnail
about each one. What gives you the confidence to believe that today’s readers
will be able to deal with such a long list of players?
MALCOLM MACKAY: It’s more hope than confidence, I suppose. Over the
course of the six books I’ve written there have been a lot of characters all
inhabiting the same universe and I wanted to be able to give a reminder of who
they are, of what they’ve done in the past. The concern about a character list
like that is that it might put people off somehow, but I’ve always had faith in
the wisdom of anyone who bought the books in the first place. Never
underestimate the reader. Any number of characters can be handled and
remembered if they’re good enough, if they matter. That’s the challenge, make
these people important enough to justify a thumbnail.
STAY THIRSTY: You wrote an earlier series under the title of The Glasgow Trilogy. What is it about
Glasgow that holds such an attraction for you?
MALCOLM MACKAY: At first I just needed an urban setting. I wanted to
tell the story of Calum, the protagonist of my first trilogy, and it required a
city that could hold that story. What works about Glasgow is personality. Glasgow
works as a city that wants to be your friend but won’t put up with any shit
from you. There are parts of it that still have the old rough edges,
industrial, working class history seeping through into the regenerated modern
elements of the place. It’s always been a city of art and writing, and those
things have become a more pronounced part of its modern identity. In books
about organised crime you’re likely to have characters of working class
background seeking to make money by exploiting modern developments, and
Glasgow, quite starkly, offers both of those.
STAY THIRSTY: What are the three most important elements you believe
a crime story must have in order to produce a satisfying read?
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| Malcolm Mackay (credit: Raj Curry) |
MALCOLM MACKAY: Character, pace and brevity. You need to have a person
that readers are prepared to follow over a few hundred pages. They don’t have
to be nice by any means, and they don’t have to be a good or morally sound
person, but they do have to be interesting.
Any story needs to move. That
doesn’t mean something always has to happen, a book can be draining if people
are being thrown into extreme trauma every chapter and big moments get
diminished if there are too many of them. You can have moments where not a lot
happens, but there has to be a sense of movement, of progress, to give the book
pace. Making a long book feel short is a massive achievement.
The third thing is knowing what
doesn’t need to be in there. Write what your book needs, not what you want to
put in there. There are always going to be things you want to put into a book,
ideas that you’ve made notes on months in advance and believe will be
important, and as soon as you start writing the books core evolves and your
plans matter less. Let some ideas go. Wipe out characters. Cut the language. If
the story and characters are good then they need as little embellishment as
possible.
STAY THIRSTY: Now that you have six novels to
your credit, what have you learned about writing fiction? How has your story
structure and writing style changed over the years?
MALCOLM MACKAY: Following on from the last answer, knowing what needs
to be in the book and what doesn’t. Trusting the reader’s imagination to fill
in the small blanks you leave for them, giving every reader the chance to
create their own vision of the book. You also learn when you’ve cut too much,
the things that more readers find important than you realised. I think my own
style has inevitably become more ambitious, as every writers probably does, and
that brings risk with it. When I started I wrote in a style that felt
comfortable, and my protagonist was as close to me as I could make him, because
I didn’t have the courage to push myself beyond that. Experience makes you
braver.
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