Meet James Oswald, the supernatural crime writer hailed as ‘the new Ian Rankin’

Pic Lisa Ferguson 28/01/2019

James Oswald - author — Pic Lisa Ferguson 28/01/2019 James Oswald - author

“Being described like that was a lovely thing and my publishers really ran with it, putting it on the cover of my books, but McLean and Rebus are from completely different sides of the track. They really wouldn’t get on,” observes the softly spoken writer.

The Inspector McLean Series of novels differ from other crime reads set in the Capital thanks to a blend of police procedural and the supernatural.

The ninth book in the series, Cold as the Grave, is out on 7 February and as James looks forward to sharing it with readers, he reflects his journey to success has been a long one.

“I wrote the first McLean book, Natural Causes, in 2005/6 and couldn’t get a publisher because of the supernatural stuff,” he explains.

Being short listed for the prestigious Debut Dagger literary award in 2007 (as was the second McLean novel The Book of Souls) didn’t help either.

“Again publishers were interested but when they saw the supernatural thing twisted through the crime, they didn’t know how to sell it.”

The feedback he received was simple: ‘We like the writing and the characters but you can’t have a police procedural and then find out it was a ghost that had done it.’

Farmer and author James Oswald crafts his latest novel watched by two of his sheep

Consequently, in 2011, James started thinking about going down the self-publishing route.

“Al Guthrie, a crime writer at the vanguard of self publishing explained to me how it worked,” recalls the 51-year-old, “E-books were easy to do, and I had these two novels.”

In a chilling twist of fate, this was shortly after McLean’s parents had been killed in a crash.

“My mum read the first two novels and loved them,” James beams, “but it was weird, because I’d introduced that central thing of Tony McLean losing his parents in a light aircraft crash, as a child.”

He pauses, “I’d only just taken over the family farm in Fife at the time after my parents died in a car crash.

“Still grieving, I didn’t have the time nor the emotional energy to write another book, so I thought I’ll put these two out there and see what happens.”

Up until the self publishing took off, James concedes there was no plan to write a third book, “I wasn’t even sure I was going to carry on writing crime fiction,” he says.

Having originally started his writing career in comics, before moving into fantasy - he penned the five book Ballad of Sir Benfro Series, which he describes as “pure fantasy, Game of Thrones-esque books with sentient dragons that talk... anything can happen in fantasy.”

With a modest chuckle he admits, “I don’t really consider myself a crime writer, which is weird considering I’ve become a best-selling crime writer.”

In fact, it was on the pages of an comic strip that Tony McLean was conceived.

“He goes way, way back to around 1992 when I was introduced to Stuart MacBride, also now a well known crime writer,” explains James.

“We were all madly into comics, sci-fi and fantasy then, and we worked on a comic script together.

“I used a character I’d used as a supporting character in a strip written on spec for 2000AD.

“The main character in it was the ghost and Tony McLean was the policeman that could see him when others couldn’t.

“I liked the character so when I was working with Stuart I brought him back, made him almost the lead character.”

Twenty years on, thanks to Kindle, Tony McLean became a hit.

“I brought out Natural Causes on Kindle in February 2012 priced at £1.99 and sold five or six copies a week.

“The plan had always been to make the first one free. If people liked it, the second one was there for them to buy.

“It took me a couple of months to work out how to make it go free, but within days of doing so it was downloading 2,000 copies a day. It went straight to the top of the charts and was the first thing people saw when they went to their kindle... from there it just built a huge head of steam.

“I was walking on air.”

Before long James found himself signed to Penguin with a third McLean novel, Dead Men’s Bones, in the pipeline and the tag ‘best-selling author’.

“After the best part of 30 years of rejection letters,” he laughs, “I was absolutely gob-smacked. Even now I have to pinch myself. It’s a very strange thing to go from obscurity to everybody wanting a piece of you.”

It’s certainly all a long way from his writing debut, a story for Tharg’s Future Shock in 2000AD comic in 1993.

“But comics gave me a very good grounding in how to structure a story, moving it along as much with dialogue than with description,” he insists.

“Actually, if you took all the dialogue out of my novels you’d probably only be left with about 20,000 words.”

Unlike most writers, James escapes to a 350 acre livestock farm in North East Fife, which he runs with partner Barbara, for peace to write, although farm duties always come first.

“I don’t get up, put on my dressing gown and go and write in my pyjamas,” he laughs, “I wish I could”.

“I don’t get up that early either, I’m not up at 6am milking cows. I get up, take the dogs out, have breakfast, check all the livestock, which at this time of year means most of the morning is taken up feeding them and making sure they are in the right fields.”

It’s from here, gazing across the Forth to the Capital, that James dreams up the gruesome murders that erupt across the city whenever DI Tony McLean is on duty.

It’s an Edinburgh that is instantly recognisable, yet different.

“It needs to be slightly different because of all the supernatural stuff, although it works well because of Edinburgh’s ancient history and ghostly goings on in locations such as Mary King’s Close and the like.”

Some of his city is drawn from his time here as a student, indeed McLean’s tenement flat in the early books is particularly familiar.

“I started doing a postgraduate course at Edinburgh in artificial intelligence but crashed out quite quickly - I was coming at it from psychology, my degree, but it was run by the computing department. It was just so technical I was out of my depth.

“While at Edinburgh I lived in Newington and Tony’s Newington flat is based on the one that I lived in.

“I also worked in a call centre off Leith Walk and in the Grassmarket, so I’ve known various parts of the city over many years.

“But the funny thing is, I wrote the first two books while I was living with my partner in Wales, so I was writing these books from memory and a couple of ordinance survey maps pinned to the wall of my study.

“There’s actually a mistake in an early book. I was remembering where I worked in the call centre of Standard Life bank when it was first set up; you had Leith, which was very run down and a bit unpleasant, but looking at my map, five minutes north you were in Trinity... so I described Trinity as being full of drug addicts.

“I got an e-mail from some guy getting really uptight about this, saying, ‘Trinity is where all the judges and lawyers live!’

He laughs, “I emailed him back saying, ‘I rest my case’.”

Cold as the Grave is published by Wildfire on 7 February, £12.99