Why the Vile City title isn't a slur on Glasgow

Since Vile City was published I've had a few people tell me that they love Glasgow and thought the title was having a go at the fair city. What's more the thought of someone picking a fight with Glasgow had

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I lived in the city for well over a decade and came to think of it as home. The people are the friendliest in Scotland and if the Scottish parliament had been located in the best place it would be Glasgow not Edinburgh.

Vile City, a former winner of the Scottish Association of Writers Pitlochry Quaich for a crime novel is so named for one reason and it's nothing to do with the city its based in.

The crimes described in the book namely the abduction of women, are truly vile.

The City in the title is important too as the next 3 books in the series which will be out soon -

Cannibal City - A killer is stalking Glasgow men, killing them and eating their livers.

Vigilante City -
When Douglas John MacDonald stands trial for the rape and murder of schoolgirl Kylie Donovan, everybody expects him to be convicted.
When he walks free there's a public outcry, but not everybody is content to just get angry.
When MacDonald is later found murdered with his pinkie removed just like his 15-year-old victim, the police think it's an isolated incident, but more murders follow and they begin to realise they're on the trail of a vigilante killer.

Romeo City - Dating is quite literally murder.
When Dennis McCombe is found with his throat slit from ear to ear in a bath in an empty house with the words Where's my beloved? written on the bath, the police realise this is no ordinary murder.
A serial killer is on the loose and she’s targeting the desperately dateless in Glasgow on blind dates - and she's just only got started. How else is she going to find her beloved?

Stay tuned and ask yourself - Is Inspector Duncan Waddell going crazy or us his best friend and colleague Stevie who's in a coma, really talking to him?

Who killed schoolgirl Caroline Glachan? - BREAKING NEWS - 3 arrests - Could the case have finally been solved?

UPDATED: - November 25th, 2021 -

2 MEN AND A WOMAN HELD IN CUSTODY CHARGED WITH CAROLINE'S MURDER 
Donna Brand, Andrew Kelly and Robert O'Brien are alleged to have killed Caroline Glachan more than 25 years ago. 

When they allgedly murdered the 14 year-old schoolgirl, they would have been 17, 16 and 18. A postmortem on vivacious Caroline showed she was alive when she was dumped in the water. 

I never knew Caroline but I often think about her and the terror she suffered in her final moments. It makes me both sad and angry so imagine how those who loved her feel?

Hopefully, Caroline and her family will finally get justice at last. 

Read more here 

Caroline had her life stolen from her 

Twenty-two long years ago, on Sunday 25 August 1996, 14-year-old schoolgirl Caroline Glachan was found dead on the water’s edge of the River Leven near Bonhill, Dunbartonshire in Scotland.

One of the last people to see Caroline alive was her friend Joanne Menzies. Caroline left Joanne and a group of friends at some shops just before midnight. She was going to meet her boyfriend in nearby Renton which was a mile away.

She never made it. She took a shortcut through the woods.

What happened next nobody knows.  

Where the teen's lifeless body was found

She was found dead on the banks of the River Leven in Dunbartonshire. She'd been badly beaten and possibly drowned. It wasn't clear if she was dead or alive when she'd ended up in the water. She could have been unconscious.

The ambitious teenager with a feisty attitude, never made it to fifteen as her life was snatched away.

A killer among us? 

Caroline's mother and Police in Scotland believe the answer to who killed Caroline lies within the local community. Could the killer of the teen be walking amongst them?

Caroline's murder was featured on TV true crime show Crimewatch two years ago, where her mum Mrs McKeich spoke in heartbreaking detail of how she found out her daughter was dead on her 40th birthday.

For her life didn't begin at forty, she said, it ended. She'd lost her only child.

"There's two questions I need answered - who and why."

Could this be the man who killed her?

After her murder, police released a photo of a man in a dark green hooded top who was seen by a taxi driver walking near Caroline as she made her way along Dillichip Loan around 12.15am on Sunday, August 25, 1996. The man was described as having sharp features.

He was asked to come forward.  The call was never answered.

Was this man her killer?

How watching bad movies can improve your writing

 

What just happened?

I just finished watching possibly one of the worst movies I have ever seen, The Wilding on Netflix. 

The characters were completely unfleshed out and cardboard cutouts and because of that and other issues I found myself not caring about what happened to them. Strangely though, I still couldn't stop watching. 

The movie seemed perfect for me. A great cast. The story was an interesting one: a family struggle to adapt back to normal family life after the daughter leaves psychiatric care.

What could and should have been a taut and twisty thriller, turned into a big hot mess. 

So what went wrong?

Give characters character

1. There were too many characters for starters and too many of them were being treated like main characters without any characterisation going on to tell me who those people were. This meant I didn't care what happened to them. 

What that taught me about writing a novel - every character has got to earn the right to be in your novel. Make them all interesting especially your main characters. Novels hinge on the main characters just as movies do. Make them weak and ruin your novel. 

~Choose your main character carefully~

Lisbeth Salander - now that's what you call
a great lead character. 

2. The main character in the movie who had the most screen time was the most uninteresting one of the lot. Not because they were a bad actor but because the writing/direction/editing or all three was a complete mess. 

Especially when it came to the editing which looked like an Andrex puppy have been allowed to run about with the film. Hey, I do know a lot of it's done digitally these days, but you get my drift.

What that taught me about writing a novel - Make sure your main character is the most interesting person in the novel. This is especially important if your main character is going to be in a series of books like my DI Duncan Waddell in my Detective in a Coma series. They have to possess enough depth to make people read on. 

Is that really the end?

3. An extremely confusing ending that made me think someone had cut the last 5 to 10 minutes off of the film. Either that or it was the first episode of a series. It wasn't. 

What that taught me about writing a novel - You don't need to have everything sewn up at the end of a novel but your ending has to be a clear and satisfying one. 

You don't want people to be setting scratching the heads and say "Where's the rest of the novel?"

Movies and novels are a completely different form but they do have things in common. Just as you can learn things from reading what you consider to be bad novels, you can also do the same when you're watching bad movies.

And everyone thinks I just watch Netflix so I don't have to write:)

Why we need flawed characters in fiction like DI Duncan Waddell star of the Detective in a Coma books

DI Waddell is no Mark wahlberg 

I'm currently working on a new crime novel. It's a police procedural and the main character is an amazing human being both physically and mentally. They have no bias. 

Handsome and charming, they run ultra marathons and raise wads of money for charities in any free time they have. 

Their partner is very supportive of their job and they have an amazing family. 

Thankfully, I am lying and I am not writing a book with the person I described as a the lead character because I hate them already.

Let's face it, who wants to read about perfect, unflawed characters like the one I just described? 

I know I wouldn't. 

How boring would that be? 

The reason is simple - someone who's the perfect human being would be so boring to read about. For one thing, how do you have conflict in a story with a character like that? Well, they're perfect so how would they possibly get into any conflict with anyone? 

And, they would solve the crime within the first two pages.

perfect is boring 

When I am reading, I like my main characters with loads of imperfections and conflicts. That's how I came up with DI Duncan Waddell. He's a decent man, relatively good at his job but he has problems. Not the least of which is that his friend and colleague Stevie Campbell, who was attacked by a suspect he was trying to apprehend and ended up left in a coma is talking to him. 

And only to him, leaving Waddell to wonder if he's losing his mind. 

He has other problems too. He eats too much junk food so has a paunch on him. If someone were to play him in a movie it definitely would not be someone like Mr chiselled abs Mark Wahlberg.

He consumes way too much sugar, so is a borderline diabetic and that's why his wife Isobel is trying to force him to eat healthier. 

He loves Glasgow, the city where he lives and works, but is fast coming to despise because of of the sick and twisted crimes comes across. Hence the name of the first installment featuring him is Vile City. 

Sometimes he even hates his job so much that he disappears into the nearest quiet place to have a swig of whiskey and wishes he had become a history professor as he is a Scottish history buff.

Waddell is flawed and human. 

I hope that is why readers will like him. 

~ Vile City, the revamped first book in the Detective in a coma series is out soon from Diamond Books

Why not what come and meet him? You may like him. ~

Stop victim shaming and blaming women. It's time some men changed.

 

The last time I went running I passed a group of men and one shouted that I had a fat backside whilst another commented in very graphic terms on my chest. 

This isn't unusual. Women get sexually harassed all the time, whenever they go out, whether just walking to work or running in the park. 

But my be able to hear those men shouting things at me is my own fault. How dare I think I can go out and exercise as a woman alone without a man keeping me company? And, what was I thinking of not wearing a pair of headphones or earphones so I could listen to music on my MP3 player?

It's your fault if you don't wear earphones and your fault if you do

What the hell was I thinking of? If I had been listening to music I wouldn't have heard the comments. 

Clearly this is my fault. I asked for those comments. I invited them by virtue of the fact I wasn't listening to music. I'm stupid and stupid women deserve to have those types of comments aimed at them. 

But hey, wait a moment. Isn't it advised by the police not to wear earphones so you can be fully aware of your surroundings? At least that's the spiel women and girls hear all the time. 

It's just another form of victim blaming or shaming the female of the sexes has to constantly put up with.

Maybe instead of blaming women and girls for lewd comments, sexual harassment and unwanted touching and worse in the case of Sarah Everard, it's time that some men (not every man behaves like this) looked at how they behave. 

Bite back those comments you have no right to make and tell your sons to do the same.

Women and girls should have the right to leave their homes for exercise, enjoyment or work, or any damn reason without having to to wrestle with the dilemma of whether to to wear earphones and then being blamed no matter what they decide to do. 

Truth is always stranger than fiction - Bible John - Glasgow's unsolved murders

The killer they could never catch

Who was Bible John? 

In Vile City, my first Detective in a Coma novel, a serial killer is going around Glasgow abducting and killing young women. The press have dubbed this killer the Glasgow Grabber.

In real life, Glasgow's most notorious serial killer is a man who has never been caught. Someone who's nickname even today, sends terror throughout the city.

A good looking, well dressed, soft spoken man who was given the name Bible John because he said his name was John and he quoted from the bible.

He's believed to have murdered three women in Glasgow between 1968 and 1969 that he'd met at the city's Barrowland ballroom. All three victims - nurse Patricia Docker, mum of three Jemima McDonald and Helen Puttock - were raped and strangled with their own stockings and their handbags were taken.

They saw his face 

What makes Bible John so unusual is that he shared a taxi with one of his victims (his 3rd and last know victim), Helen Puttock and her sister Jean and happily chatted away to them. Jean also invited another man to share the cab with them too (despite appeals, he never came forward). That left two people - the sister and the taxi driver - who could have identified him.

It was because of that taxi ride that the police managed to get so much information on the killer, including developing a psychological profile and a photofit. By all accounts, Bible John was an extremely polite and easy going companion.

The sister Jean got off at her stop, leaving tragic Helen Puttock alone with Bible John.

Poor Helen was found raped, beaten and strangled in the garden of her own flat the next morning. She'd put up a fight and there were grass stains on her feet showing that she'd tried to run. Her handbag was missing and police think her killer took it as a trophy.

A man was later spotted with his face covered in scratches and in a rumpled state on a bus heading into the city centre. Whenever that was Bible John or not, it’s impossible to tell.

Was Bible John's motive misogyny? 

One facet of the crimes that shocked Glasgow were that all three women were menstruating at the time they were brutally murdered, suggesting a hint of misogyny to the murders. Or was it a case of he wanted to have sex with the women, but saw them as unclean? 

Who knows what goes inside the head of such a warped individual? 

Bible John has never been found. Like other infamous killers who escaped justice, theories abound about Bible John's whereabouts and his identity. but the one person who may have been able to identify him, tragic Helen Puttock's sister Jean, has long since passed away.

One belief is that the well spoken man who recited from the bible, may have gone overseas to work as a missionary which would explain why the murders abruptly stopped. Could he have carried on his killing spree undetected abroad, perhaps in Africa?

There are other theories such as that Bible John joined the army or was a police officer (apparently the way he was dressed was the way members of Her Majesty's Constabulary dressed at the time).

Is evil convucted killer Peter Tobin Bible John?

A young Peter Tobin next to a photofit of Bible John 

Evil killer Peter Tobin, who has been convicted of three murders and who is believed to behind many more, has also been linked to the killings as there are those who think he resembles the Bible John photofit.  The name Helen Puttock's sister said Bible John gave them was also similar to one of Tobin's known aliases.

However the man who probably knows him best and who brought him to justice, retired DCI David Swindle believes there's no evidence to link Tobin with the crime. 

Tobin's victims were all very different from Bible John's who murdered grown women.

The children the coward killed 

Tobin's victims could be described almost as children - Vicky Hamilton, 15, Dinah MacNicol, 18 and Angelika Kluk who although she was 23 looked much younger and was living a long way away from her Polish homeland when Tobin who was working as a caretaker at the church where she was staying raped and murdered her.

Bible John was also described as well-spoken and well dressed, two things weasel-faced Tobin could never be described as. 

It seems like we'll never know the true identity of the monster who held Glasgow in a grip of terror and destroyed three families' lives forever.

You'll need to read Vile City to find out if DI Waddell and his team catch the man they are after, the man dubbed the Glasgow Grabber.