BOOK REVIEW/ New crime novel returns to Lewis/ Author event

by Margaret Chrystall

There’s a quote that often appears on the front of the crime novels of Scottish writer Peter May “… a writer I’d follow to the ends of the earth”, the New York Times reviewer once wrote.

I know what they mean. May first transported me to a China where millions of bicycles on the streets were still a reality in 1999 and the swiftly-changing country with fledgling police protocols tested the East-West partnership  of Li Yan and Margaret Campbell – a Beijing cop and an American female pathologist.

The Enzo Files followed, Scottish forensic lecturer Enzo Macleod now living in France dug into a cold case and increasingly sinister mystery over seven novels.

And stand-alone novels also take you to new territory. In 2014, Entry Island, a tiny place in Canada’s Gulf of St Lawrence, saw policeman Sime Mackenzie arrive in a team of eight to solve a murder. Or the fashion world in Paris, introduced with a contrasting setting in the Isle of Harris in I’ll Keep You Safe, and the Costa Del Sol was brought to us on the trail of a vengeful gangster in A Silent Death (2020).

But the story of Lewis policeman Fin Macleod in what became the Black House trilogy was the one that turned the writer into a bestselling author.

And it’s easy to take a liking to Fin, the character a detective sergeant at the time in Edinburgh. But in the first book, he returns home to investigate a murder which also means the chance to share the sad story of his past life, long left behind, and find out more about the landscapes and characters that have shaped his life and start to lure him back.

Readers loved it and two more books followed, The Lewis Man and The Chess Men, as we witness Fin’s changing life.

Million of copies of May’s career-spanning crime books and stand-alone novels often take you places most of us will only ever visit in our imagination.

May keeps his crime plots fresh and contemporary . As a former journalist before he turned to writing and producing drama, including the long-running Gaelic ‘soap’ Machair that allowed him to create an authentic Hebrides – he loves to research for his novels, delving into subjects that often throw new light on the worlds May guides us to.

May has always moved on, no different after the trilogy was written, bringing so many stories and themes to eager readers.

In Lockdown, he revived his idea for a pandemic like Covid hitting the UK – and sometimes it was spooky reading about the strangely similar, sometimes almost psychic moments May had originally imagined and that we were all living through, in his novel.

But did we ever think May would return to the Black House trilogy to add a new story and an update to Fin’s life, tackling crime in his own ways more than a decade on?

The Man With No Face set in Brussels, written in 1981 (as Hidden Faces) when Peter was still a journalist. His third book, with a “light revision” for 2019 – was by then a different world from the one in his original book, as he commented at the time.

Coffin Road, which headed to the Hebrides and Harris, for a murder and a scientific secret that has implications for the whole world. As with most of May’s book, the world around his characters teems with real life and contemporary problems. But it was possibly the first that confronted his fears for the planet and how we were treating the world we were changing, abusing and threatening as weak custodians of its wellbeing and mankind’s own future.

In May’s last book, A Winter Grave he returned to Scotland and Lochaber, but this time the different world he gave us was the future and a pitiless one, where all our fears of climate change and technical advances society was being forced to make, were starting to become evident.

One character comments: “It’s important they [children] know about the world we’ve destroyed, don’t you think?”

It’s a jaded Fin who meets readers again in 2024 in new novel The Black Loch.

A draining job in Glasgow is scarring his mind, as his relationship with Marsaili – the love of his life from Lewis schooldays – is not delivering the joy both had hoped for.

But it’s when the second-worst news every parent dreads – their grown-up son Fionnlagh is being charged with murder back on Lewis, that the two had back to the island.

It has been inevitable perhaps that Fin would head back.

In the final novel of The Blackhouse trilogy, The Chess Men (2013), he wonders: “… if it would ever be possible to rediscover the love they had felt that teenage summer … he wondered about the life that awaited him on the island of his birth, the place which he had tried so hard to escape but which had in the end drawn him back.”

Previously, Fin’s first wife, Mona had alleged in The Lewis Man (2012): “You can never escape the island. It was there between us all these years. Like an invisible shadow. It kept us apart, something we could never escape.”

In May’s latest return, a striking image once again opens the story – a shocking moment that kickstarts this novel.

No longer a police investigator, Fin has to call on all his previous skills if he is to try and clear the name of son Fionnlagh.

There’s an update on Fin’s one-time colleague, Detective Sergeant George Gunn, working on his new ‘hand-held device’ which has replaced notebooks for pictures and reports, nippy at his colleague trying to help him, assuming he doesn’t know how it works. But May reveals age is playing its part in the speed Gunn walks to the crime scene as he tries to keep up with his colleague, but he is still old school about the job.

“The guilt he always felt when confronted by a death he had not been able to stop.”

Characters from Fin’s early days walk back into his life as he confronts the mystery of just who would kill the charismatic schoolgirl celebrity Caitlin.

From the whaling of his late grandfather Shen, to the current practices in fish farming, the writer fleshes out the human story so close to home for Fin in The Black Loch.

If anything, May’s Lewis has never felt more alive – the beauty, the dangers, the weather, the landscape and the way Fin’s instincts guide him forward. Searching for answers, Fin has to set a father’s love to one side to become a detective – and learn how to refind himself.

The Black Loch (Riverrun) by Peter May is out now in hardback. The writer is interviewed at Eden Court, talking about his new book, on Wednesday, September 18 at 7pm. Tickets: An Evening with Peter May | Eden Court (eden-court.co.uk)