By Michele Magwood for Sunday Times
Close to the Bone
Stuart MacBride, Harper Collins
**** (4/5 stars)
Stuart MacBride has a voice like an old dressing gown: warm and soft and burry, a voice to draw around yourself to keep out the cold. On the phone from Aberdeen, however, it’s the heat he’s talking about. He’s fed up with the unusually hot weather currently blanketing the UK. “Scottish people are not designed for this,” he says, “I like the cold and the dark and the rain.”
That’s certainly how he portrays Aberdeen in his novels: granite-grey and wet, reeking of rubbish and junk food, with vomit in its gutters and “the smell of old fish and spilled diesel” wafting over from the quay.
Despite his seven-figure sales and bundle of crime-writing awards, MacBride is down to earth, which may be related to the fact that he grows potatoes in his spare time. Not that he has much spare time. He’s written 11 novels in just seven years. He calls himself a “write-tist ”, saying “novelist” and “author” sound poncy.
MacBride’s visceral, grisly books are a slap up against the head of conventional crime fiction, the violence balanced by bawdy humour and a cast of uncommon characters. His detective hero Logan McRae is an anti-hero, really, a far cry from the solitary, damaged, alcoholic gumshoes that star in so many thrillers. “Detectives always have a sidekick and I thought it would be interesting to make the sidekick the central character.”
His boss Roberta Steel is a foul-mouthed hoyden, rough as a badger’s arse and given to such outbursts as “Do what you’re sodding told or I’ll have your scrotum for a shower cap!”
“The Scots sense of humour is very dark,” MacBride says. “I’ve worked in many teams in my life and when things get hard that’s when the humour comes to the fore. That’s how they distance themselves, it’s a coping mechanism.”
His books have been criticised for their graphic brutality, but MacBride doesn’t see them as overly violent. “I like to put the reader inside a character’s head, to see what he sees, instead of that ‘Look away, gentle reader’ approach some writers have. That’s just patronising.”
The action in the latest book, Close to the Bone, kicks off with a necklacing and two missing teenagers. It leads McRae and the team on to the set of a movie being shot in the city, a teen cult film called Witchfire. Bodies begin to stack up. Asian immigrants are being kneecapped, rival druglords are at one another’s throats and someone is leaving strange knots of bones on McRae’s doorstep. The twists keep coming until the end.
Does MacBride think cult books like Twilight and The Hunger Games are dangerous for teenagers? “Any cult, whether it’s religious or not, can be dangerous,” he says, “but there are more dangerous things for teenagers to be involved in than books. Before, it was Tolkien.”
Crime stories, he believes, are the mirror of society. “If you go all the way back, Beowulf is about a serial killer. These stories reflect the anxiety of our times. Jekyll and Hyde was all about the Victorians’ fear of sexuality. We’ve been telling scary stories since we were in caves.”
MacBride is heading to Joburg to take part in The Bloody Book Week. “I’m looking forward to reading South African crime,” he says. “It’s interesting; I believe you can see what a society thinks of itself by reading its crime stories.” — @ michelemagwood
Book details
- Close to the Bone by Stuart MacBride
EAN: 9780007344291
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