Colouring in mysteries from the past
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
LIVING in Scotland’s oldest university town, Shirley McKay does not have to look far for inspiration.
McKay, who appears at Inverness Book Festival on Thursday with fellow crime writer Gillian Galbraith, combines history with mystery in her series about Hew Cullan, a young lawyer at the time of King James VI.
Now at its third volume, "Time and Tide", where the cargo of a wrecked ship brings devastation to the town, the series begins in 1579 with the first book "Hue and Cry" and will, the author hopes, continue up until Jamie the Saxt of Scotland becomes James I of England.
"It’s a period people don’t know much about," McKay said, contrasting King James’s Scottish reign with that of his mother’s and the much covered rule of his southern neighbour Elizabeth.
"It’s a part of the past that could do with colouring in. There’s a feeling that after the Reformation Scotland was very grey and dour, but during James’s reign there was a lot of colour and incident despite the fact that the Reformation brought an end to a lot of festivals and plays."
As the series progresses McKay foresees the life of her fictional hero, Hew, and the king becoming more intertwined and the fourth book, set in 1583, will see King James himself settling in St Andrews Castle.
"My aim is to show the life of real people with real problems," she added.
"There’s always a degree of anachronism with historical fiction. If you have a hero who was a real 16th century man, he would be fairly repellent — especially for female readers! Having said that, the more you read about the period, the more you understand them. I get round that by having a hero who is a little bit of an outsider. He was educated in France so he could have a more liberal outlook. For example his sister has epilepsy and because he is educated he deals with that fairly well, where in reality it would have been absolutely devastating.
"At the end of the day though it is important remember it is fiction so the dictates of the story and character are more important than strict historical accuracy."
Writing in a relatively unknown period of history can have its advantages, though, especially when it comes to writing about real life characters.
"In the historical records, characters tend to be skeletal rather than fleshed out, but who is to say what someone was really like? History doesn’t fill in the small detail," she pointed out.
"I think James was very weak as a real-life character, which is probably not at all surprising given the circumstances of his upbringing — his father was murdered and his mother (Mary Queen of Scots) was exiled and he became king when he was just 13 months old."
The king’s dysfunctional background, McKay believes, probably led to James developing paranoid tendencies, perhaps most famously in his belief in witchcraft, King James authoring a book on the subject after the North Berwick witch trials. Perhaps understandably, he had a constant fear of assassination, and McKay’s fourth book will delve further into royal fears with spies real and imagined in St Andrews.
McKay’s first success as a writer came when she was still a teenager, winning the Young Observer young playwriting competition with her play performed at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs.
Despite this promising start, McKay revealed her writing career had stalled when she started university at St Andrews.
"When you write when you are young, you are terribly introspective," she explained.
"The thing about writing history is that it does give you a field to write about so you are not just writing about yourself."
Starting writing again when her children were young, McKay was shortlisted in the Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger competition for unpublished writers. That success, based on an opening chapter and synopsis, attracted the interest of a literary agent, but McKay was unable to take the story further when one of her children became ill.
It was after she wrote the words for a local book of photography that another agent became interested after a review mentioned, slightly erroneously, that she was writing a novel set in 16th century St Andrews.
That encouraged her to finish the novel.
"It took me seven years to write ‘Hue and Cry’, though not writing all the time, and seven months to write the second book. I’m accelerating," McKay laughed.
?
Shirley McKay appears with Gillian Galbraith in the OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, on Thursday as part of the 8th Inverness Book Festival. The Hew Cullen books are published by Polygon with the fourth book scheduled to appear in June 2012.
