I’m absolutely delighted to join the BlogTour for the return of McLean!
I absolutely love Scottish crime, so I was delighted to be invited onto the blogtour to celebrate the return of one of our favourite investigators. It’s great to be given an insight into Tony McLean from @SirBenfro himself. Hope that you enjoy this exclusive content and bag yourself a copy of #ForOurSins as soon as you can. Thank you to the lovely Graeme Williams as ever for the invite. Absolutely loved being part of the McLean story…
FOR OUR SINS the 13th in the Inspector McLean series is OUT NOW.
The partial collapse of a disused Edinburgh church reveals a dead body in the rubble, his head badly smashed by falling masonry. Soon identified as an old ex-con – Kenny Morgan – his death is put down to a heart attack and deemed non-suspicious.
Tony McLean is approached by a notorious crime lord who suggests the police should be looking into Morgan’s death more closely. Despite struggling with his recent retirement, he is reluctant to involve himself.
But when a second man is found dead in another disused church, his forehead branded with a cross, this time it is clearly murder.
There’s a killer stalking the streets of Edinburgh. Is it time for McLean to get back to doing what he does best?
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McLeans (retrospective on the series)
Hard to believe that there are now thirteen books featuring my beleaguered detective. It all seems to have happened very quickly, and indeed the first print edition of Natural Causes was published only eleven years ago. But Tony McLean as a character has a much longer history than that.
Cast your mind back, if you can, to Aberdeen in the early 1990s. I was recently graduated, unemployed and wondering what to do with myself. I had loved comics from an early age, and following a talk at the Central Library by Grant Morrison and Mark Millar, I set about seeing whether I could master that medium.
I had early success, too, selling a script to 2000AD that was published in December 1993. In the long months between selling the story and it coming out, I wrote several more speculative scripts for 2000AD, one of which was an Edinburgh-based ghost story that features a familiar detective inspector. Initially he was John McLean, but then I rewatched Die Hard and decided a change was probably wise. So he became Tony.
2000AD didn’t buy that story, or indeed any of the others I wrote over the course of a few years. I reused Tony as a useful policeman in a script I wrote in collaboration with Stuart MacBride (yes, that one), which again failed to find a publisher. He appeared in a couple of unpublishable novels I wrote in the latter half of the 90s, too, but he wasn’t a fully formed character at all. Just a policeman who, unlike his colleagues, could see the ghosts and other unusual things lurking in the shadows.
Stuart is responsible for my dusting off the character and giving him his own stories. His advice in the early oughts to stop writing nonsense with dragons and sheep in it and instead turn my efforts to crime proved good, even if it took the best part of a decade to persuade a publisher to take notice of my detective stories with an otherworldly twist. In the end, it was the success of Natural Causes and The Book of Souls as self-published eBooks that set the ball rolling.
And what a rollercoaster ride it’s been. For Our Sins is McLean’s thirteenth outing, and I’ve written three adventures for Detective Constable Constance ‘Con’ Fairchild too. As well as finding a home for that nonsense with dragons and sheep in it and a standalone novel set largely in a remote forest in the middle of Wales. Not that I’m done with Tony McLean yet. The first draft of book fourteen is almost done, even if as yet I have no title for it. I’ve a few ideas scribbled down for book fifteen too.
James Oswald is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Inspector McLean series of detective mysteries. The first two of these, Natural Causes and The Book of Souls were both short-listed for the prestigious CWA Debut Dagger Award. Set in an Edinburgh not so different to the one we all know, Detective Inspector Tony McLean is the unlucky policeman who can see beneath the surface of ordinary criminal life to the dark, menacing evil that lurks beneath. James has also introduced the world to Detective Constable Constance ‘Con’ Fairchild, whose first outing was in the acclaimed No Time To Cry.
As J D Oswald, James has written a classic fantasy series, The Ballad of Sir Benfro. Inspired by the language and folklore of Wales, it follows the adventures of a young dragon, Sir Benfro, in a land where his kind have been hunted near to extinction by men. The whole series is now available in print, ebook and audio formats.
James has pursued a varied career – from Wine Merchant to International Carriage Driving Course Builder via Call Centre Operative and professional Sheep Shit Sampler (true). He moved out of the caravan when Storm Gertrude blew the Dutch barn down on top of it, and now lives in a proper house with two dogs, two cats and a long-suffering partner. He farms Highland cows by day, writes disturbing fiction by night. Visit James’ website HERE