Edinburgh-based crime writer Doug Johnstone is preparing to Crash Land – but he’s set to take off in America.
Scotland is home to numerous successful crime fiction writers, but Arbroath-born Doug Johnstone is surely the only one who has a PhD in nuclear physics. “I quit a high-paying engineering job and became a freelance music journalist,” he says of his first step towards novel-writing. “My mum’s never forgiven me still.”
Admittedly, Mrs Johnstone shouldn’t have been completely surprised. “I was always writing stories, just for my own amusement,” Doug says. Yet his literary career didn’t follow the route you might expect. “I ended up not doing English at university because I had a particularly annoying English teacher I didn’t like, and he didn’t like me. I also really enjoyed science, so I went down that route. But I was still writing stories the whole time, for my own amusement. Short stories, of which there’s no longer any record of, thankfully – but it’s all a learning process.”
He started to take fiction writing more seriously once he became a freelance journalist. “Even though I was more busy, trying to set up a name for myself, and pitching everywhere, I was more energised because I was writing for a living. So I started to write my first novel. It was the familiar story: I wrote it, it was pretty terrible; I rewrote it and then sent it off to everyone listed in the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook. They all rejected it – some more politely than others – but there was enough of a boost from a couple of people to suggest that maybe this was worth me pursuing. So I sent an early draft of my second novel Tombstoning to those two editors and I was gobsmacked – they both offered to publish it.”
One of those editors was Judy Moir, formerly of Edinburgh-based Canongate, who had worked with writers including Louise Welsh and James Robertson. Doug appeared to be off to a good start when Tombstoning was published by Penguin books in 2006. The Ossians appeared two years later. Yet, by then, Judy had been dropped by Penguin and soon afterwards so was Doug. “I didn’t really have anyone fighting my corner,” he says. “I wrote a third novel which remains in a drawer because it’s mainly crap.”
After two novels, Doug “had a bit of time out”, changed agents and then went back to work on Smokeheads, eventually published by Faber and Faber in 2011. “I kind of feel like that third novel was me finding my voice; I haven’t gone back and read Tombstoning and The Ossians, but I now think of them as kind of overwritten, trying too hard to do things at the expense of the storytelling. It was only with Smokeheads that I really found my style, what I was trying to do, and hopefully the books since then have matured a little bit – without being mature!”
Since Smokeheads, Doug has essentially written a novel a year; his eighth, Orkney-set Crash Land, is published this November, while two of his earlier novels – Gone Again and The Fall – are published in America this summer. It’s an exciting way to celebrate a decade on the nation’s shelves, but does he worry about being thought of as part of Scotland’s ‘Tartan Noir’ bandwagon?
“It’s a very broad church, crime writing,” he insists, “and it’s a really great community of writers; they’re much more fun and have better parties,” he says. “The best crime writing is as good as any other writing out there. You look at writers like Megan Abbott, Denise Mina and Helen Fitzgerald, who are doing really interesting things on the edges of what is conventionally called crime fiction. So it doesn’t bother me at all to be referred to as a crime writer; I’m quite honoured.”
That said, a term increasingly applied to his own novels is “domestic noir”, given that his focus is invariably on the ordinary people affected by crimes rather than the various professionals expected to solve the case. “It’ll do me. It’s set in a domestic situation, and it’s noir-ish, so why not?”
Life-changing moments, often occurring in his opening chapters – sometimes even on the opening page – are a hallmark of Doug’s novels. “Life-changing moments happen all the time,” he insists. “You get the results back from the doctor; you accidentally crash the car; you witness a fight – these things happen a thousand times a day to people all over the world. So the writing starts with a ‘what if?’ If I do my job well enough as a writer, the reader should really think: ‘What would I do in those circumstance?’ It’s something they should be able to picture. And it should not be an easy answer; if it’s an easy answer, it’s not the best ‘what if?’”
“I think you only see a person’s true character when you put them under pressure; you see then how they really react. One of the things I try and do is take the reader on a journey, to go along with characters doing perhaps morally dubious things. In The Jump, for example, the main character does some things that are very suspect, but – if I’ve done my job correctly – hopefully you’re on her side. I’m really interested in how far you can push that; in the new book, Crash Land, the main character gets involved in a situation where it’s not at all clear whether he’s doing the right thing or not, and whether he’s doing anything that’s morally right or morally reprehensible. You don’t have to want it to work out for him, but I hope you want to know what happens to him, that you care enough to know what the outcome is.”
A totally different literary creation Doug cares quite deeply about is the Scotland Writers Football Club, which he co-founded with author Allan Wilson and publisher Mark Buckland towards the end of 2011. “That’s been really interesting, actually, because we thought it was just a muck-about when we started – and it is – but a real sense of camaraderie has grown up among the different writers in the squad, and between us and other teams as well. Because we do book events around them, you get a real sense of how how other countries regard their literature, how they think about writing, and how writing relates to their culture.
“We’ve got playwrights, screen writers, poets, people writing in Scots and Gaelic and all sorts of other stuff – so it’s really interesting to talk about something that isn’t necessarily about writing,” Doug adds. “There’s something particularly interesting about football in that it’s actually the opposite of writing; you’re not thinking about things. There are tactics and stuff, but you’re basically in the moment, and living and doing something physical, which is the complete opposite of sitting at a computer, conjuring up imaginary worlds.”
Like many a lad growing up in Scotland, Doug loved nothing better than kicking a football around. “At the book launch for The Fall, Helen asked me I would rather play football, or write books or make music professionally. And the answer’s always: play football. I was never nearly good enough, but if I had the choice – definitely football!”
First published in The Scots Magazine, July 2016.
