A Dark Matter

"It’s a really great read. I read this in two days when my life was very busy, and I really shouldn’t have been taking time off to sit in the corner and read, but I just kept wanting to return to it because I was marvellously entertained and engaged by it. The basic setup is that the Skelf family has a long-established funeral home business, and also a private-eye business. When Jim, the patriarch, dies, it’s left to his wife Dorothy, his daughter Jenny and granddaughter Hannah, to take charge of both businesses. I think it’s really terrific that the family are called Skelf –a ‘skelf’ in Scots dialect has two meanings: it means a splinter of wood – like when you get a splinter in your finger – but also by extension somebody who’s a pain in the neck, a troublesome person, somebody always causing trouble wherever they go. “Scots are very good at that dark, black sense of humour” It starts off with Jim’s death, and very quickly we discover that the image they have of the dead man as a warm, honourable, decent, kind guy, is not quite the whole picture. The big question that runs through the book is just how far from the truth their image of their dead father and husband is. Dorothy discovers there are mysterious payments out of the firm’s bank account to another woman. So was Jim really the doting husband she thought he was? Hannah’s best friend has vanished from university, and that leads them into all sorts of dark corners. Then Jenny, the middle one, starts looking at what’s supposed to be a simple adultery investigation. Before she knows it, she’s into something much stranger and much darker than any of them could have pictured at the start of it all. So you’ve got these different intriguing stories interweaving through the book and interlocking. Running through it all like a dark thread is their grief, which keeps intruding in the most uncomfortable and awkward places. They’re struggling with their loss, they’re dealing with these complicated cases, and all the time they’re having to accommodate the things that they’re learning about the family and their past. It’s compelling, it’s shocking, but it’s also very funny in places. It’s very dark. Scots are very good at that dark, black sense of humour, you know? I think that’s always the thing that distinguishes tartan noir: the interest in the psychology of individuals, but also the ability to make inappropriate jokes at the worst times. We all stand at the graveside cracking jokes because that’s just how you get through. It’s a big change for Doug Johnstone. He’s always written standalone books before now, always resisted the pull of the series. But he’s already talking about this as a trilogy, and I can’t wait for the next one. I suspect it could easily turn into a much longer running series than that. It has quite an interesting origin, too. Doug was actually writer in residence in a funeral home for six months. He spent six months working with the people in the funeral home, and talking to them and understanding their work and finding out what their jobs actually entail. So he’s put all of that to very good use – there’s an authentic feeling to the setting. It dispels a lot of myths, and certainly I came away from it having learned an awful lot about the business of how we deal with death. I think one of the other interesting things about Doug is that, on the surface of it, he’s a Scottish bloke – a strong, tough guy, who plays football, likes a pint with the lads, stuff like that – but he writes women brilliantly, with real insight and an unsentimental understanding. That’s one of the standout things in his work, and it’s really clear in this book. Again, it’s a far from happy ending, but it’s a really good read. I suppose it really started as a story of failure. I was convinced when I left Oxford that I was going to write the great English novel. I tried to write literary fiction, and I clearly was rubbish at it. I mean, that doesn’t surprise me. I started my first proper novel when I was 20, and you think you know everything about the world when you’re 20, but in fact, you know nothing. And so, having failed at writing literary fiction, I thought I would try crime novels, because I read a lot of crime fiction and loved it. It was always my guilty pleasure, if you like. So I thought maybe I could write a crime novel. The thing that kick-started me from thinking, ‘maybe I could write a crime novel,’ to actually getting down to it, was Sara Paretsky’s first novel, Indemnity Only . I loved that there was a strong female character with a brain, a sense of humour, agency. Also, I loved that it wasn’t just some random village that had had a random murder bolted onto it: the crimes that happened in her novel happened organically. They happened because of the kind of place Chicago is, because of the kind of things that people do there; because of the jobs they do, because of the politics in the city. I thought: ‘That’s the kind of book I really want to write.’ And so, I started writing what became Report for Murder , and the rest is history. I’ve been lucky that I began writing crime fiction at a time when the genre became much more expansive, much less hide-bound by form. We can be much more experimental now. We can write in all sorts of different tones and styles and still fall within the big tent that has become modern crime fiction. I genuinely think that, in the way that we go now to Charles Dickens to find out how people really lived in Victorian era, in a hundred years’ time, when people want to find out how we live now, they we will go to the crime novel."