A new short film, written and presented by writer and broadcaster James Crawford, charts the rise of Scottish crime fiction and sheds new light on the success of the UK’s bestselling genre. Including never before seen interviews with some of the biggest names in crime writing, it traces the origins of one of key influences on all of their work.
Produced by Publishing Scotland to mark the start of Bloody Scotland, the Crime writing festival which takes in place in Stirling each September, and the 2021 Frankfurt International Book Fair, Dark Travellers – the Rise of Scottish Crime Writing is a 22-minute documentary film featuring seven award-winning authors talking on the subject of crime writing today: Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Abir Mukherjee, Christopher Brookmyre, Marisa Haetzman and Graeme Macrae Burnet.
James Crawford said: “All of the authors interviewed in this film keep coming back to the idea of the crime novel as being the ideal space to explore the human condition. This, it seems, is at the core of what makes crime writing so popular – a desire to work beneath the surface, to uncover the lies we tell and the secrets we keep; to explore the extremes of personality or circumstance that drive people to commit crimes, or even to kill. And is there something in the air, or the water, or the landscape that makes Scotland’s crime writers so adept at this? Much of their success is, I’m sure, down to their being so skilled at unpeeling these layers of personality, to expose the raw nerves of identity, and truth.”