Bookworm: ‘The BBC thought it might be interesting to make a documentary about a year in the life of an author’

WALKING on stage at Glasgow’s Mitchell Theatre on Saturday filming the audience for his Aye Write! event with Alex Gray, Ian Rankin could well be setting a new trend among authors.

“For some reason,” he explains, “the BBC thought it might be interesting to make a documentary about a year in the life of an author.”

Once he sat down, however, he switched off the camera, which means that a future TV audience will be deprived of the explanation for why he set so much of his latest novel, The Impossible Dead, in Kirkcaldy.

Malcolm Fox and his team from the Complaints and Conduct Department spend so much time there, he revealed, because the owner of the Pancake Place restaurant in Kirk Wynd won an auction to get it mentioned in the book. In fairness to Rankin, he didn’t just mention the place but made it the setting for quite a few scenes in the story.

Has this given it must-see status on Kirkcaldy’s cultural map? Sadly, not. “I heard that the owner had to sell the place,” Rankin reveals. “I only hope that the charity bid wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

STRANGE AS FICTION

Alex Gray was on fine form too, as well she might be: not only has she a new DCI Lorimer novel hot off the presses (A Pound of Flesh) but everything seems set fair for Scotland’s first crime writing festival which she and Lin Anderson are organising to hold in Stirling on 14-16 September.

Already, Bloody Scotland has lined up 50 events, good sponsorship and a new short story competition (see glengoyne.com/bloodyscotland).

But sometimes doing her research can be unexpectedly worrying. Asked whether she had ever come across anything that frightened her while doing her research, she mentioned that only on Tuesday she had gone to Barlinnie to read a story to the prisoners. In it, a girl called Tracy-Ann was brutally murdered. Afterwards, the librarian asked Gray whether she had noticed any reaction from one of the prisoners in the group. No, she replied, and asked why. “Fifteen years ago,” she was told, “his sister was chopped into bits. She was a heroin addict and was working as a prostitute. And she was called Tracey-Ann.”

“I was horrified. I hope someone got the message to him that I hadn’t been writing about his sister. But it’s weird all the same, isn’t it?”