Welcome to Glasgow by Russel D. McLean

Novelist, short-story writer, editor, reviewer, and author of the J McNee series Russel D. McLean’s upcoming novel is And When I Die, to be released this year from Contraband Books. Here he discusses setting and his story “Tout” from the September issue of AHMM.

My first story for AHMM, back in 2004 (I was twenty-four at the time!) was set in Dundee and featured a detective by the name of Sam Bryson. I liked Sam then, and I still like him now. He was a hardboiled kinda guy, with a few problems, a supportive partner and a best friend who had more than a few of his own demons. His stomping ground was the city of Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland. I’d been living there since I went to uni, and was getting to know the place well.

One Sam story led to another. And another. A few more. Sam was meant to get his own book, too, but I was persuaded to “reboot” the character by my then agent. I handed Sam’s offices to an even more tragic and dour PI by the name of J McNee (we never did find out what the J stood for), although Sam himself has made a few more appearances in the pages of AHMM since then (notably last year’s “The Water’s Edge”).

But you can’t keep doing the same thing forever.

In 2014 I moved to Glasgow for personal reasons (my girlfriend and our cats were there, so it made sense) and began writing full time soon after. The more I explored the city, the more I realised there was something here that made it very different to Dundee, and a place I wanted to explore through my writing. I began work on a novel—And When I Die—set in the city. But I wanted to flex my literary muscles a little first. A short story seemed the ideal way to try and feel my way around this new city, to get a hint of the ways it operated that were distinct from what I knew so well in Dundee.

I also wanted to create some new characters, too. Another PI would have been lazy. And since I like a challenge, I figured that, for this particular short, I’d have a stab at something I’d always been scared of: a procedural.

The story itself—concerning the death of a man who was selling fake tickets for the Commonwealth Games—seemed an obvious choice. At the time of writing the story, we were in the midst of preparation for this major event (that went off without a hitch in 2014), and it seemed to me like an obvious hook.

Any time you have a major event, someone, somewhere will want to try and take advantage. A ticket tout seemed an obvious place to start. I already had a fictional gangland in mind to explore in And When I Die, and so I connected the tout tangentially to one of a pair of warring gang bosses. The two cops—Stringer and White—never made it into the book, but I have a feeling that this isn’t the last time that we’ll see them in action. I enjoyed writing them too much; these sparring coppers whose mutual respect is unstated and yet obvious.

I’m proud of “Tout” for a lot of reasons, and I’m glad Linda and the team at AHMM like it, too. I hope the readers of the magazine get a kick out of it—the new detectives and location, especially.

But even though I write about crime and the darker side of the Scottish urban experience, the one thing I’ve found with the real life Glasgow is that it’s an incredibly welcoming city. I’ve been here for three years now, I’m very proud to call it my new home. I hope that as my fictional exploration of it continues, I’ll continue to find new surprises, unexpected nuances and hidden secrets around every corner. The deeper I delved into the city after writing Tout, the more fascinating things I discovered to explore in my new novel. But this isn’t the end. No, I have a feeling there’s plenty of intrigue left in this place. And I hope that readers will enjoy discovering it alongside me.