Taking an interest in the true facts of climate change triggered Peter May's new novel
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
Maybe if bestselling Scottish thriller writer Peter May hadn’t started reading around climate change and its effects in the run-up to COP26, he would never have written his new book set in the future.
A Winter Grave which is out on Thursday (January 19) is a book that was never supposed to happen. As Peter explains, he had made up his mind to retire.
“Effectively I had decided that I was finished, that I was retiring. People said to me ‘Writers can’t retire, you’ll always want to write!’,” Peter laughed.
“But I want to do other things,” said the writer who has sold 12 million books worldwide so far.
“I’ve been writing all my life and for the last 10 to 20 years, I’ve just been writing a book a year or more and travelling for promotion all over the world and it is exhausting. It was getting too much.”
Peter – originally a journalist who became a scriptwriter, then producer of the Gaelic drama Machair, before embracing fiction – turned down contract offers for another book.
But not long before the climate change conference in Glasgow, Peter – the former award-winning journalist – turned again to some of those reporter’s basic skills he has used over the years researching his novels to do some deeper study into the facts about climate change.
“I still had no idea about writing a book, I had just been reading up on the subject, the history of it and the science and the scepticism, what was the science saying and predicting,” Peter explained.
“I spent three months and read dozens of newspaper articles and reports and watched hours of video. It became apparent to me, the more research I did, that the more peril I realised the world was in, and the human race – and the future of the human race.
“I thought ‘I have to write about this!’.
“But how do you write about a subject so big and I’m a crime writer and readers don’t want to be preached at and I was well aware of all that.
“So I wrestled with the idea of how would I write about this in a way that would draw attention to it.
“None of us have a voice. I have one tiny little voice in a sea of growling humanity!” Peter said, recalling that frustration.
“How would I make it heard above everything?”
But he acknowledged to himself that because he is known as crime writer, his name is perhaps better-known than the man in the street.
He says: “I suppose I have perhaps a slightly louder voice than most people. But in the end I decided I couldn’t write about climate change in itself, that’s not a story you can manage in terms of a book.”
Peter decided he would write a classic police crime thriller.
“But I would set it 50 years in the future when the world has been fairly radically re-ordered because of the effects of climate change and not in a way that everybody is going around saying ‘Look what climate change is doing to us, isn’t it terrible!’ but just as a background.”
It’s quite a departure from Peter’s regular genre of writing, though his crime books – particularly his standalones – have always taken his readers to different places and ways of life many people might not have encountered before.
In I’ll Keep You Safe in 2018, the writer took readers to Paris and the world of the textile and fashion industry where a couple from Lewis were due to show their own brand of tweed at an international fabric fair.
A Silent Death from 2020 is set in the contemporary Spain of crime, drugs gangs and introduced the world of a deaf blind character at the heart of a gripping plot to readers.
And earlier in Coffin Road, set in the Outer Hebrides, scene of his successful Black House series set on Lewis, but this time centred on neighbouring Harris – the impact of pesticides on plummeting world bee numbers made its way into the plot, perhaps a clear precedent for the writer’s current engagement with climate change in his latest book.
Deciding to set new book A Winter Grave in the future brought a whole new set of challenges.
But Peter says he enjoyed the extra twist of creating a future world – and not just any world, but Scotland in the future.
“I chose the year 2051. It’s the year I would turn 100 if I were to survive, though I don’t expect to be around then. I wouldn’t want to be if all my predictions turn out to be accurate,” Peter laughed.
A quick look at some of the research Peter did into creating as accurate a picture of how the world will be once climate change starts to impact, as he could, shows many options.
He had to choose how he would create his future world.
So, for example, climate-wise in this Peter May future, Scotland’s summers would be colder and wetter with freezing winters with more snow and ice storms.
“I don’t think the picture I paint is wrong, but it is one of several possibilities and no-one knows for sure how it is going to go – but the fact it is going to go is beyond question.
“I just chose a specific scenario which is scientifically-based and I chose Scotland as the place to base the book obviously because it is my home country.
“It is in the direct path of the Gulf Stream and has quite a temperate climate as a result.
“But if the Gulf Stream is interrupted, Scotland will be subject to the same kind of weather on the same kind of latitude as Alaska, for example. And it will be 10 degrees colder at least.
“So Scotland seemed like an obvious place I should set the book. I know the people, I know the country, I know the culture. And it suited the purposes of the picture I was painting in terms of climate change,” Peter said.
Much of the story is set in the West of Scotland, Kinlochleven, where in 2051 there is nuclear power. But Kinlochleven has an interesting past, as far as power innovations are concerned.
Peter said: “In the book I was following the Finnish model, they have nuclear power stations and bury the waste deep into the earth permanently and safely. It’s something I didn’t really touch on in the book, but I read with interest they have small modular nuclear reactors, things not much bigger than the room I’m sitting in and much cheaper to set up and run.”
He pointed out that Kinlochleven had its own pioneering past in terms of power innovation.
“Kinlochleven was called The Electric Village because it was the first place in the world to have full electric lighting.”
Imagining the details of a futuristic life in a 2051 life, things like how people would be transported, and would communicate with each other – phones? or something more futuristic? were just two examples where Peter used his imagination, but also not even futuristic, but current developments, like eVTOLS – vertical take-off and landing vehicles or electric helicopters.
Peter said: “The helipcopters or eVTOLS that I use in the book are all in development at the moment. They are amazing and very recently I read somewhere that the Olympic Games in Paris will have eVTOLS fly passengers from Charles de Gaulle to the centre of Paris, so these things are coming onstream and they will be the norm in the future and transatlantic flying may be something of the past.
“ In my scenario Glasgow Airport has been flooded so the international airport is out of use, and that was all great fun and I enjoyed looking at that.”
Peter said: “Thirty years into the future is not really very far. Thirty years ago I would have just started filming the Gaelic drama series Machair and that feels like yesterday to me.
“I had my first mobile phone, a Sony ‘Mars bar’ as they called them then, and it was very hard to get a signal anywhere!”
And the future of Scotland’s politics and government is another area Peter had to think through for his novel.
“Planning to write A Winter Grave, I thought 30 years would pass in no time. What would it be like politically here? So I thought ‘Let’s assume Scotland has become independent!’ and I would have a bit of fun, and see what an independent Scotland looks like. Which I did!”
In A Winter Grave, Peter’s veteran Glasgow cop Cameron Brodie heads off to Kinlochleven in the West Highlands to investigate an unusual murder in an ice-bound village.
But Brodie’s also got his own reason to want to go there with just one chance to try to heal a family rift. And Peter also puts his character under severe pressure personally in a way he has never written about before. Brodie has reasons that make him likely to see the world differently than he ever would have done before.
Peter said: “At the end of the day people want to read about people not issues or subjects. They want to read human stories and to identify with people and feel their pain and be lifted by their joy, all those human emotions.
“There is a recurring theme in a lot of my books, and this was a final resolution of that for me. Brodie realises all the things he has been putting off, that he needs to resolve … and that was interesting as something to explore.”
And though Peter’s vision of the future is bleak in terms of climate change, he still believes those playing fast and loose with the earth’s future can be stopped.
In his notes for the book, he wrote: “Many scientists believe we have already passed the tipping point, beyond which there will be no going back for our planet or our species. I take the view that if we take drastic action now, it might not yet be too late.
“It’s why I wrote the book.”
A Winter Grave and its message is going to be high profile in the next few weeks – it comes out on Thursday (January 19). Peter is doing a tour of talks that brig him to Inverness. And the book will be in every supermarket – and the top promoted book in Tesco’s.
Peter said: “It will have a high profile, I think and obviously I am very happy about that.
“The whole reason I wrote the book was to get a sense of this looming catastrophe out to people.”
He has even written a song about it.
Don’t Burn The World is a song written by the author and his lyricist collaborator, Dennis McCoy, as a plea for the future of the planet in the face of catastrophic climate change.
Peter had just completed writing A Winter Grave, set in a world devastated by climate change.
And as with his latest book, the song was inspired by the failure of political and commercial interests at COP 26 in Glasgow in 2021 to agree a radical
programme of cuts in the CO2 emissions that are driving global warming.
He came up with the idea for the song as an anthem for the youth of the world.
“Most of us are helpless in the face of the multi-billion dollar fossil fuel industry which has spent tens of millions in the last decades spreading misinformation and casting doubt on the science behind the climate crisis.”
He added: “We have so little time left to save our world, and I wanted to give everyone the chance to express themselves in a song we can all sing, a song that might just make a difference. Particularly for the children, since this is the world the rest of us will be leaving them.”
Peter even arranged for a children’s choir on the Isle of Lewis to sing the song’s chorus...
Don’t Burn The World will be available to stream and download on multiple platforms from Saturday (Jan 14): https://thepetermayband.hearnow.com/
And the video is available now: YouTube
Or on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/ 785439374
May said, “This song is not intended to make money. But in the unlikely event that it does, all revenue generated will be donated to charity.”
Peter May will come to Inverness for a special event at Eden Court on January 24. Find out more: eden-court.co.uk His book A Winter Grave is published (riverrun, hardback £22) next Thursday (January 19).
