Bestselling Scottish crime writer Doug Johnstone has had quite the career trajectory. Safe to say his life has many plot twists.
One of his earliest memories is of falling into the Keptie Ponds in Arbroath as a boy, but things have looked up from there.
Lad from Arbroath
He went on from his happy Arbroath childhood to get a PhD in nuclear physics.
After that he designed radar and missile guidance systems for military aircraft before turning his hand to writing, picking up a diploma in journalism along the way.
Today he has 13 novels to his credit. Black Hearts, has just published, the latest in the Skelfs series and The Courier is currently serialising A Dark Matter, the first of that series.
Offbeat, quirky and compelling, it is the first series Doug has ever written – all the rest of his books have been standalones – and follows the lives of the Skelf family, funeral directors and private investigators.
The two family businesses occupy the same building in Edinburgh, and the central characters are women.
‘I can’t believe what you are doing…’
“This was the first group of characters I found to write about over a series, using the funeral directors as a backdrop, and their evolution against it,” says Doug from his Edinburgh home.
“I get feedback like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe what you are doing to these poor women’.”
But they are hardly ‘poor women’, not really. They are strong, resourceful and off-beat and, one way and another, death is their business. Doug spent months at a funeral parlour as a writer-in-residence, it’s an industry he knows from the inside.
A Dark Matter begins with the unorthodox cremation of Jim Skelf: “Her dad took much longer to burn than she expected. Jenny watched the deep flames lick his body…”
Fast forward to Black Hearts, which begins with a fist-fight at an open grave, and you get the idea of Doug Johnstone’s writing. He grabs you and keeps you there, with gripping plots, well-drawn characters and a dark – and also gentle – sense of humour.
Bloody Scotland
When we meet on Zoom, he’s just back from the Bloody Scotland International Crime Writers Festival, where he’s been a regular during its 10 years.
A co-founder of the Scotland Writers Football Club, he’s happy to report they won the Bloody Scotland 2022 match against England, 6-4.
This year he discussed ‘Death As The Day Job’ at Bloody Scotland, along with AK Turner and Mary Paulson Ellis.
“It was about the death industry – lots of interesting stuff about attitudes to death, things you don’t get a chance to talk about much.”
There’s another plot twist. An accomplished musician and songwriter, he’s a founder-member of The Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, a band of crime writers including Val McDermid, and Chris Brookmyre, and has released six albums and three EPs.
Writer at work
A day in the life of Doug Johnstone sounds quite disciplined.
“I tend to write fiction in the mornings, Monday to Friday, I think if you try to write all day you kind of burn out. I write in short bursts, I’m very regimented. I sit down at 9am, and aim to have 1200 words by lunchtime.”
His afternoons are spent “planning and plotting” and on his journalism. Oh, there’s journalism out there too. He’s been an arts journalist for about 25 years.
“If you write every day, 1200 words, you’ll have a novel in four months,” he adds. After the editing process “it’s about a year, all in” until a novel is published.
Black Hearts starts off dramatically, but its heart is very human.
“Halfway through I realised that everything was about grief,” he explains. “There are four different storylines, about how each one of them reacts to it.”
Natural born crime writer
Grief and the ways people grieve interests him. One of characters in Black Hearts died of a broken heart, for example, and there’s an elderly Japanese man who thinks the unhappy ghost of his dead wife is haunting him.
“I think the Western conventional relationship with death is really quite unhealthy,” he says. “A lot of indigenous cultures have a far healthier attitude.”
Doug Johnstone’s work focuses on the human experience, but he’s a natural born crime writer. You can expect a rollicking ride from Black Hearts because one thing is certain. He knows his business, death included.
Black Hearts is published by Orenda Books.
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