This House of Burning Bones

Twenty Years of Logan & Co

If you’d told me, way back in 2005, that I’d be sitting here, twenty years later, writing a wee note for the back of the fourteenth Logan book, I would’ve laughed in your face, stolen your hat, and pooped in your soup.

You see, when I finished Cold Granite, I had no idea it would be the start of a series. I was working full time in IT in those days, and as the owner of a knackered LaserJet, my dreams of publication entailed getting enough of an advance to buy a new printer. I never thought I’d be lucky enough to do this making-up-lies malarkey for a living. And yet...

I first had the idea for Logan McRae while walking up Union Street — halfway across the road between the Sofa Workshop and Starbucks — contemplating the usual format for crime novels. I’ve always loved them, ever since I was allowed to borrow books from the school library, and most of them followed the same formula: weirdo detective solves crimes while dragging a sidekick around to explain the plot to. The Hero Protagonist is quirky and odd, but the sidekick is usually a much more normal kind of person, because they represent us, the readers. The writer needs to show how ingenious H.P. is (and how clever the writer is), so the sidekick is there to go, ‘By Jove, how the devil did you deduce that?’ every time something ‘thinky’ happens.

But wouldn’t it be fun, I thought as I narrowly avoided being run over by a taxi, to do it the other way around? I’d make my detective a normal person, while the people he worked for would be the quirky weirdos. Basically, I would write a crime novel about a sidekick. Only this sidekick would be the one who solved all the crimes.

Oh, and the police officers would act like real people, not ROBOTS FOR JUSTICE. They’d have lives, and make fun of each other, and cock things up, and be jealous and silly and grumpy, and do their best to muddle through. You know, like real people.

Then there were the cops Logan would work for — DI Insch and DI Steel — an angel perched on one shoulder of his fighting suit, and a devil on the other. Though it was never entirely clear which was which. And sometimes they swapped.

The setting had to be Aberdeen, of course. At this point in the LongAgo, crime novels could only be written about Edinburgh, Glasgow, or wee Highland villages, by law. The Book Police would arrest you and steal all the vowels from your keyboard if you wrote about anywhere else. But Aberdeen was my hometown, I grew up there, and that made research far easier than setting it somewhere I couldn’t walk or drive to in fifteen minutes.

A lot’s changed in the past twenty years, both in Aberdeen and the books. It’s been a strange old journey, but I’m glad you’ve been here to share it with me.

Here’s to the next twenty...