North-east author explores the dark side
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BILL Kirton was born in Plymouth (“ages ago”), but came to Aberdeen in 1968 to teach French at the university. He has been here ever since and, while he acknowledges that he will never be an official Aberdonian, he loves the city and the north-east and has spent most of his life here.
Before taking early retirement to concentrate on writing, he became well known in media circles in the city, mainly through writing, directing and acting with local drama groups.
With his wife, Carolyn, he wrote and performed in highly successful revues at the Edinburgh Festival and was a presenter of Grampian Television’s Flair, a weekly magazine programme, and The Electric Theatre Show, which focused on the cinema.
He has written many radio plays for the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and his stage plays have been seen here and in the US.
He has also been a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at The Robert Gordon University, and the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews.
Nowadays, as well as earning his living by writing scripts for safety, training and promotional programmes for companies here and abroad, he is concentrating on writing crime novels.
The first two, Material Evidence and Rough Justice, were published in the UK and, more recently, the US, where they were part of the series, Bloody Brits, which was aimed at making the best of British crime fiction available to a wider American market.
They are police procedurals and he chose to set them in a fictional town called Cairnburgh, which he placed just west of Aberdeen.
His reason for that?
“Well, I thought if I started suggesting that policemen in Aberdeen might be corrupt, incompetent or members of the Masons, I might start collecting too many parking tickets – or something even worse.”
Bill has, however, set a crime novel called The Figurehead in Aberdeen, but safely back in the year 1840. It features a figurehead carver and is set around the quays of Aberdeen harbour. It will be published as an e-book and a paperback in the US this summer and will be available from the publisher, Virtual Tales.
The most recent in the Cairnburgh series, featuring DCI Jack Carston, is The Darkness. As the title suggests, it’s not a cosy read, and Bill’s idea was to question the whole idea of “goodies” and “baddies”.
It features a prominent local GP, Andrew Davidson, whose days are spent caring for his patients and generally behaving as the doctor we would all like to have.
But the memory of his brother being found with his throat cut, and his conviction that he knows who was responsible for it, make his thoughts turn to vigilante retribution.
Known villains begin to disappear and Andrew’s nights are taken up with darker deeds that he doesn’t really understand himself.
When Jack Carston begins to suspect him and simultaneously realises that he secretly approves of what’s happening, the inner darkness threatens to overwhelm both of them.
At the same time, rape victim Rhona Kirk starts a new life as an escort in Dundee but finds it difficult to shake off her past as men connected with her also start to disappear.
For Carston, it’s a race against time and against darkness.
The book has earned some good reviews on Amazon, where readers have said, “I often find myself skipping bits in novels, but not here. I read every word”, and “this is a book you will keep on reading because you simply have to know what’s going to happen next”. One even went so far as to say that it’s “a novel to give Stuart MacBride a run for his money”.
Michael Malone, who reviewed it for the Dumfries and Galloway Standard, warned readers to “be prepared to be manipulated and have your moral compass reset by this master storyteller. This book is clever, tightly constructed, immensely satisfying and peopled with a cast of completely believable characters who pull you into their story and don’t let you go until the final word. Go on, get yourself a copy of The Darkness and ask yourself this: what would you do?”.
The Darkness, priced £7.99, is published by YouWriteOn.com. It can be ordered from all the major online booksellers.
