Dundee crime writer Russel D. McLean was once the guy in my year at school who used to pass out during classes.
I’d forgotten that about him until we meet more than 25 years later for this interview about his latest novel The Friday Girl.
Russel, it emerges, was last year diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
“When were at school, that was the naughty kids’ disease,” he shares over coffee.
“But for me, because my brain was doing 20,000 things at once, it was overwhelming. I was concentrating and focusing on everything all at once.
“I was technically very smart, but I never felt I was doing well.
“That’s where the fainting came in. There were too many things going on at once. So my body just went ‘oomph’ and shut down.”
At the time, Russel didn’t know why the blackouts happened. Today, after receiving the ADHD diagnosis at the age of 43, they have eventually made sense.
Kidney stone ‘shaped like a dagger’
After friends and family gently questioned the reasons behind some of his behaviours, Russel waited five years on the NHS to get an official diagnosis. During that time his condition manifested in strange ways.
“Downing 13 cups of coffee a day” left him with kidney stones. One, he mentions with pride, he later discovered was shaped like a dagger.
The eventual diagnosis brought a mixture of “sadness and relief”.
“One you get off the waiting list, they are brilliant, but they are so underfunded. I’ll get on my soapbox here. We need to fund mental health better than we do.
“There are so many people who are waiting so long.”
He says he was often “anxious inside” during his years at Bell Baxter High School in Cupar, Fife. We were in some of the same classes during this time.
His condition, he explains now, meant he was wary about making proper friends, too worried what people would think of him.
Russel McLean: Dundee Waterstones years helped him develop
These, I think later, are not exactly my memories of Russel McLean. But that only shows how well Russel was able to mask the more troubling aspects linked to his condition.
He worked on our school yearbook in sixth year. I thought he was zany, full of fun and strange humour.
Although our paths have crossed since, that’s that image of the man I’m looking for as I scan the Waterstones café on Commercial Street.
But a disconnect between a celebrated crime writer’s inner and outer worlds shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.
An only child, Russel grew up rural North East Fife before coming to Dundee to study in the late 90s.
He stayed on and worked as a bookseller in Waterstones – then Ottakar’s – for the next eight years or so.
Unsurprisingly, he looked after the crime section. He still has friends from those days in the shop today who help us set up photos next to the shelves he used to stack and curate.
He was always writing too: eventually producing seven crime novels so hard boiled you could break a tooth on them.
Released in 2008, The Good Son put Dundee private investigator J McNee in front of readers for the first time.
Why did Russel Mclean start writing about Dundee again?
The gumshoe would feature in another four of the 44-year-old writer’s books. Russel published the last McNee book – Cry Uncle – in 2015.
Today, he lives in Glasgow with his wife, and fellow novelist, Lesley McDowell. He splits his time between writing and working as a freelance fiction editor.
He chose to return to the city where he made his name with his latest offering, The Friday Girl.
Its title references an old feature in DC Thomson’s own Evening Telegraph where, Russel explains, editors sent photographers out to take pictures of “women with nice smiles in the workplace” before publishing them in the paper.
The story also loosely references the Templeton Woods murders – two of the city’s most notorious unsolved crimes. The killer, or killers, committed them in 1979 and 1980.
Russel’s own novel begins in Dundee in 1978. It references Balgay Park, West Bell Street Police Station and the NCR factory in only the first handful of chapters.
Why return to the city in such a big way?
“I was working with other writers [as an editor] – but there was always something in the back of my mind about Dundee that needs to be done.
“There’s something about the way the city changes, particularly between 1978 and 1991. That whole period is where Dundee gets kicked and comes back.
“You end with the Timex riots in 1991 and then things start to change again with Grand Theft Auto and Lemmings.”
Publisher told him to move the story to Edinburgh
Russel’s novel is no rose-tinted stroll down memory lane.
His main character is a female policewoman, Elizabeth Burnet, who is “being underestimated by everybody, particularly the men around her.”
“I thought how bad is it now – never mind back then? I wanted to go back to 1978 and look at a woman who was trying to change all this.”
Did he ever feel that wasn’t his story to tell?
“Absolutely. But I wanted to tell the story in a way that wasn’t taking the story from women, but was acknowledging the fact that men cannot ignore these stories either.”
Russel points out his wife Lesley and editor Rachel were among his first and most critical readers.
The topic, itself, marks a full circle moment in Russel’s own career.
He tells me someone in the book trade suggested he change the book’s setting to Edinburgh “because people know Edinburgh.”
He looks unimpressed.
“When I first came in here [Waterstones/Ottakar’s] that was when The Law Killers came out [former DC Thomson journalist Sandy McGregor’s non-fiction book on notorious murders in the city].
“That was the best-selling book in Scotland. And if memory serves, it was down to the sales in Dundee.
“To see that absolute love of a place that I found a lot of people had written off.
“People were hungry for stories about Dundee.
“That’s a real full circle moment for me as my latest novel has the same publisher – Black & White.”
Russel politely declined the publisher’s Edinburgh suggestion.
He senses Dundee’s desire for stories hasn’t gone anywhere.
And that – having come to terms with his own ADHD diagnosis and its impact on his life – he is now perfectly placed to tell them.
The Friday Girl is out now. Russel is hosting an event at Waterstones Dundee with fellow crime writer James Oswald on 27th March
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