Taking the writing on the road - Craig Robertson

Taking the writing on the road

Craig Robertson

As any crime writer or criminal will tell you, the trick of getting away with it is not to get too greedy and never, ever, return to the scene of the crime. Quit while you’re ahead.

That’s maybe what we should have done after organising the first Bloody Scotland festival in Stirling in 2012. It had been bold and reckless yet somehow we pulled it off. We built it and they came, crime writers and readers in their thousands, and no one got hurt. It was a small but beautiful miracle.

Did we return to the scene of the crime? Well of course we did.

Greedy for more of the same, we did it all again in September. The 700-seater Albert Halls were sold out for both Jo Nesbo and Lee Child, and there were huge audiences for the likes of William McIlvanney, Colin Bateman, Arne Dahl, Denise Mina, Christopher Brookmyre and Mark Billingham,

My own Bloody Scotland experience was a mixed bag. I say mixed, I mean weird. The ever-excellent Chris Carter and I had a full house for our discussion about serial killers.

I also had the dubious pleasure of moderating the formidable pairing of Val McDermid and Stuart MacBride. I say moderating, I mean being hopelessly out of control. Keeping those two in order was like trying to catch flies with chopsticks.

Finally, I was part of our Killer Cookbook event to help raise money for Dundee University’s ground-breaking new morgue. A gang of crime writers have supplied recipes for the book and this was our chance to cook them for an unsuspecting audience. Sadly, I was banned from making human black pudding with scallops and apples. Health and safety gone mad, I tell you.

We should have been satisfied with getting away with it for another year but no. Instead we decided to take the show on the road as part of Book Week Scotland which ran from November 25 to December1.

Bloody Scotland on Tour featured eight events and 24 crime writers and saw us roll into Edinburgh, Dundee, Orkney, Lasswade, Stirling, Glasgow and St Andrews. (If you’re counting, we went to Stirling twice).

Taking a festival on tour is something of a weird concept to start with. The idea is usually that people come to you and get the chance to see a bunch of their favourite writers in one place, with one event after another.

This was more like taking the band on the road again. You know… groupies, roadies, trashing hotel rooms and throwing pianos into swimming pools from twenty floors up. Except without the roadies, room trashing or piano throwing.

It’s really all about the groupies. Or readers as they’re more usually known.

Despite the wonders of social media that let an author tweet a pearl of wisdom, or what they had for lunch, to a few thousand readers with a single click, it doesn’t replace meeting real people. It’s part of a writer’s job to get out there, meet the public and sell a few books.

It’s healthy for us too. By the nature of it, our working day means being locked up on our own and it’s too easy to lose sight of what we’re doing and why. Meeting readers and explaining why your protagonist is so messed up or what you were trying to say with that ending, is a useful part of the process.

It helps that readers are a very friendly bunch and are willing to come out in all weathers to listen to and meet authors. There’s nothing quite like someone telling you they loved your last book to brighten up a wet Wednesday night in Wick. (We weren’t actually in Wick on the Wednesday, we were in Kirkwall on Orkney but the alliteration is much more difficult.)

There’s a real appetite out there for crime fiction and I think there’s probably a morbid fascination for readers to see the kind of people that dream up such brutally violent scenes. The disappointing truth is that most crime writers are actually normal and nice. It’s those chick-lit authors you have to watch out for…

So, have we learned our lesson or will we return to the scene of the crime yet again? Of course we will. Some of the very biggest names in the business will be in Stirling from September 19 next year and I can’t wait. I could tell you who they are but, of course, I’d have to kill you.

Craig Robertson's latest novel, Witness the Dead, is available now!