Welcome back to Book Break! Recently I have noticed that a lot of the books I've been
picking up or adding to my TBR, and a lot of the books that I've seen other BookTubers raving about
as well, have been by Scottish writers - and a lot of them have also been very dark! So I think we've
got a bit of a theme going here on dark Scottish writing, so that's what this video is going
to be about. And some of the most famous dark Scottish writers that you may have already read
include some of Arthur Conan Doyle's darker stories like The Hound of the Baskervilles
or The Devil's Foot. There's also of course the famous Gothic novella The Strange Case
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson. And there's Ian Rankin's
Inspector Rebus novels which are a series of crime novels set in Edinburgh. So if you loved all of
those I have got a bunch more recommendations here for you to dive into. Starting with the Edge
of the Grave by Robbie Morrison. This is like Scottish Peaky Blinders set in 1930s Glasgow.
In this book Inspector Dreghorn is investigating the murder of the son-in-law of one of the city's
wealthiest shipbuilders, and this investigation is made more complicated by Inspector Dreghorn's
own troubled relationship with the victim's widow Isla. But it turns out that was just the first of
the murders to come. And James Oswald described this book as “wonderfully gritty, violent and
nasty in all the right ways”. The Library of the Dead is by T.L. Huchu who is a Scottish-Zimbabwean
author. This one is set in Edinburgh and gets a bit supernatural. So our main character here is
a ghosttalker. Her job is to get messages from the dead and pass them on to the living, but through
this she gets wrapped up in this whole underground conspiracy theory that leads her to a magical
occult library. So our main character has to use Zimbabwean magic along with Scottish pragmatism to
solve this case. And this is just the first in the Edinburgh Nights series. For a bit of cosy crime,
Murder Movie by Jill McGown is about a Hollywood hotshot director who comes to western Scotland
to shoot a movie about love gone wrong - but even more starts going wrong off set. And by the
time the third body shows up, nobody knows who to trust. Everything about that sounds amazing to me.
Then I've got a fascinating book here, His Bloody Project by Graham Macrae Burnet. So this is set in
1869 and it's presented as a series of historical documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae,
who allegedly committed a triple homicide. So the book is presented as if it's non-fiction,
and you get to play detective as you read, trying to figure out what happened. A big chunk of the
book is Roddy's own memoirs, so we're getting his version of events, but then statements from
other witnesses, medical records, as well as psychological statements, all combine to paint
a slightly different picture. It is a really interesting book and definitely one I want to
reread and look for more clues. The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter by Malcolm Mackay is the
first in the Glasgow Underground series, which as the title suggests are very dark and gritty. In
this book our main character is a hitman, tasked with carrying out a seemingly very simple murder.
The job goes well but the consequences are more than he ever expected. Lin Anderson is a very
prolific writer of dark Scottish crime stories, and in The Innocent Dead, forensic investigator
Rhona Mcleod, who is a very popular Lin Anderson character, is trying to solve the mystery of
a girl who went missing 45 years ago, after a body has finally shown up. So it's really
interesting getting to see her use the advances in forensic science to solve this case, and to dive
back into the past and experience what really happened. The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing
by Mary Paulson-Ellis is a historical mystery about an heir hunter called Solomon Farthing,
who is trying to find the relatives of an old man who died alone in his Edinburgh nursing home,
leaving 50 000 pounds sewn into the lining of his old coat. So the story takes us all the way back
to 1918 when a group of soldiers were abandoned at a farmhouse billet in the weeks leading up
to the armistice. So the book is dark, it's full of the brutality of war, but it's a really really
rewarding story. And finally I've got here Grimoire by the poet Robin Robertson. This
is a poetry collection that tells the stories of Scottish folktales, so this is definitely the next
one on my TBR, it sounds so good. It really caught my eye this part in the description where it said
that “Grimoire tells stories of ordinary people caught up suddenly in the extraordinary. Tales
of violence, madness and retribution, of second sight, witches, ghosts”, so on. I am sold. And a
grimoire by the way is like a book of magic spells or a manual for summoning spirits, so if you love
Scottish writing I'll put a link here to a video that the wonderful Lianne from literary diversions
made for us before. We got an actual Scottish person unlike me to do a roundup of her favourite
Scottish writing along with a little scenic tour, so do click through and have a look. And leave
your recommendations of your favourite Scottish writing in the comments below. See you next time!