Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where do you live? When did you first know you wanted to become a writer, and what got you started writing crime fiction in particular?
I live in the Western Isles of Scotland, where I was born and raised. Apparently, when I was a kid, I used to say I wanted to be an author, but I didn’t take writing seriously until I was in my late twenties. I was reading a lot, crime fiction in particular, and had the idea for The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter. Wrote it in the summer of 2011 and got myself an agent. I got a call from him one week after my thirtieth birthday telling me he had a publisher who wanted the trilogy. So I became an author.
The international reception for the Glasgow Trilogy has been nothing short of amazing—your work has been short-listed for some of the top awards for mysteries and thrillers from the Crime Writers Association, How a Gunman Says Goodbye was the winner of the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year Award, and all three novels have been the recipient of incredible rave reviews. What’s it been like to have your work received this way, especially considering these novels are the first you’ve ever published?
Because they’re the first books I’ve written I don’t really have anything to compare it to. It is a surprise, though; when you write something with a distinctive style it’s inevitable that style is going to grate on some. Thankfully people keep being very generous towards the books, and the crime writing community has a well-earned reputation for being supportive. Pressure’s on me to make sure I keep producing books deserving of that generosity and support.
What is it that drew you to writing about a hitman? Did you do much research into the lives of hitmen or criminal syndicates in general before you got started? Was there a reason you decided to focus on a young, up-and-coming hitman as the primary focus of your work, rather than having someone like Frank MacLeod anchor the series?
It was the isolation of Calum as a hitman that drew me to the idea. All of his life is hidden, and he has to live in a way that protects that secret. The idea of someone choosing to be a killer, accepting it as a job, was fascinating to me. There are so few people that would ever contemplate it, such a small percentage of people who would ever be capable. What makes these people different from us? What can convince a man to do that job and live that life? I didn’t do an awful lot of research, and Calum and the people around him were always very deliberately fictional and free to be whoever I wanted them to be. In Calum’s case, that meant a man with decades ahead of him. He’s chosen this work, this life, and he could be tied to it for thirty to forty years. His growing awareness of what that means was always going to be one of the most interesting facets of his story.
What came first for you—the character Calum himself or the conceit of The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter? Is Calum modeled on a particular professional killer, or is he more a kind of thought experiment about what someone in his position would be like?
I started out with the idea of Calum, a young man hiding himself away from the world. From that single image came the story of Calum the killer, working for people he rarely meets and trying to exist in a city without being seen. With Calum’s lifestyle, it was always a question of putting his work first. If he wanted to be the best possible gunman, what kind of social life could he have? What sort of relationship could he have with his family? With his employers? Every element of his character was designed to be a logical step outward from the young man, trying to be the best killer he could be.
Did you start out with the idea of one novel in particular, or did you have the overall sweep of the Glasgow Trilogy in mind as you began writing? Did you find that details of the story you’d planned started to change as you wrote, or did you already have in mind much of the story before you put pen to paper?
The idea for Lewis Winter was there first, and I knew I wanted to do something with Frank. As I wrote the first book, and characters came to life, the idea for the second and indeed for the third became clearer. Still, they didn’t end up exactly as I had planned, because they never do. You can start out with a beginning, middle, and end in mind, but the book is going to go where it wants to go, and sometimes all you can do is follow.
One of the most impressive things about the Glasgow Trilogy is the sheer number of characters you’ve created, each with their own personalities and agendas. Of all the characters in the Glasgow Trilogy, is there one in particular who you most enjoyed writing, or a character you found yourself liking more than you’d imagined you would? Who among your creations would you say is the most honorable of the bunch? Who is the most despicable?
The most enjoyable characters to write are typically the ones with plenty going on under the surface. I already knew when I was writing Lewis Winter that I wanted to do a lot more with Frank, because here was a man with decades of work spent killing others. He fascinated me. The fact that he had lived his life that way, that he had become the sort of person Calum would have to become. Zara was great fun to write as well. She may be exploitative and dishonest, but in many ways she’s much less evil than the people she’s surrounded by, and smarter than most. It’s the people who pull the strings who I consider the worst. People like Peter Jamieson, who make these things happen, who send others to kill so they can make money from it. Profit more important than life. His opposite is DI Michael Fisher, perhaps the only truly honest person in the book. He may not be lovable, or even likable at times, but he’s a man trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, which makes him rare.
Is it true that you’ve actually only been to Glasgow a few times? If so, why did you choose this city in particular to write about? Did you do any particular research into the milieu, or did you allow your imagination free rein?
It was true at the time I wrote Lewis Winter, less so now. I live in a small town on a small island, so the idea of placing a story of a gunman here was out. It needed urban and I wanted that setting to be somewhere with a personality of its own, which Glasgow has. The setting doesn’t feature heavily—it was a conscious decision to cut out everything but the characters and the small criminal world they move in—but the moment it steps forward it has to be able to do so convincingly. Glasgow is a convincing sort of place.
Walk us through a typical day in the writing life of Malcolm Mackay. Do you find the writing tends to move along at a steady clip, or does your output tend to vary considerably from day to day?
I’m a creature of habit, so I try to work roughly the same hours every day. I didn’t realize I was a particularly fast writer until other people pointed it out, but I tend to get a couple of thousand words a day done. Quality matters more than quantity, obviously, and the most important thing is getting a clean first draft that requires as little change as possible going forward. First drafts are usually a lot of fun, but editing can bog you down.
Who would you say your biggest literary influences are? Would you say there are more that you think readers would expect, or more they wouldn’t? What aspects of these writers’ work do you pick up in your own, if any?
I’ve always taken a scattergun approach to reading, anything that looked appealing. Plenty of crime fiction, the likes of Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett, and Richard Stark. Other writers like Graham Greene and William Somerset Maugham, Gabriel García Márquez and Alexandre Dumas. Nothing matters more than great storytelling. Ignore genre, ignore when a book was written or who wrote it. If the story is good, soak it in. I think that, regardless of what you’re reading and what you’re writing, great work will always sink in and leave a mark, influence you in tiny ways that you might not realize at the time. Reading a lot and widely is an essential part of the evolution of any writer.
What about other influences from outside your writing life? Particular people in your life whose personalities have influenced some of your characters? Do you listen to music while writing or researching, and if so, what kind? Do you mostly stick to reading for entertainment or are you also much of a film, television, or gaming person?
I’ve written so few pleasant characters I couldn’t possibly confess to being influenced by anyone around me. I do listen to music while I write, although never something unfamiliar. I tried having sites like Spotify running in the background, but every time I heard a song I liked I had to stop to find out what it was, every time I heard a song I hated I had to stop to skip the track. So familiar music, always. At some point I’ll have to try and work out if the pace of writing shoots up when it switches from Iron & Wine to Queens of the Stone Age. I read for entertainment because there’s no better form, a whole new universe to explore in a few hundred pages. I’ve also been gaming since I was a kid with my Atari 2600. Games are an increasingly fascinating space for storytelling, the narrative scope being pushed forward year on year, the ambition of storytellers in that space moving fast.
Calum’s story is at times quite bleak, but there are these wonderful flashes of dark comedy throughout that keep things from becoming too dreary. Was this an intentional decision on your part, or just something that arose naturally from your writing voice?
Life is preposterous, even at its darkest, and it’s never a bad idea to point that out. It comes naturally from the writing voice, but I hope it would have found its way into the books no matter the voice used. Situations, conversations, little moments that make you scoff or shake your head at the absurdity of them. What would life be without those moments?
Any advice for aspiring writers in general or writers of mysteries and thrillers in particular? Any parts of the process you find the most challenging and ways you work around that, or particular holes you’ve had to write your way out of that you’ve learned how to avoid with experience?
Voice, voice, voice. When you’ve got that right a lot else will fall into place. With the right voice you can tell your story more effectively, you can broaden your characters and explain their personalities more effectively. I’ve always written with a focus on character and plot, pushing every other element, every other detail that might slow the story, to the background. You might find you need to add these things in a future draft, but I think knowing your characters and their stories should be the priority of the first draft. Also, notes. I hardly wrote any for Lewis Winter, but as time’s gone by I find myself writing more and more per book. Don’t trust your memory; it probably doesn’t care about the same things you do.
If you could meet one writer, living or dead, who would you choose and why?
Perhaps Jim Thompson, someone who had a remarkable ability to get inside the head of his characters. He also wasn’t scared to experiment and be bold with his ideas. Having said that, I think the experience would be insufferable for poor old Jim, dragged out of the grave to answer the hardest question any writer ever gets asked: How did you do it?
So what’s next for Malcolm Mackay? I’m sure you have other irons in the fire—will future works be set among the crime syndicates you’ve dreamed up in Calum MacLean’s story, or will they involve a whole new cast of characters? Do you think you’ll always write about Glasgow, or do you think future works will be set elsewhere?
Well, my fourth book, The Night the Rich Men Burned, is set in the same universe but uses a largely new cast. The idea of having that setting, that world full of characters and probing into different areas of it, was very exciting for me. There’ll always be an emotional pull to go back and further explore some established characters, but at the same time there’s a need to create something new, something different. Eventually that need for newness might pull me away from Glasgow, but there are plenty of murky corners there to stick my nose into first.