Scottish writer Francine Toon’s second novel, Bluff, is set in the fictional Fife town of St Rule, inspired by St Andrews. This atmospheric new thriller blends the tension of a mystery with the chill of a modern gothic, moving between the narratives and timelines of characters Joanie and Cameron.
Congratulations on Bluff. Where did the idea come from? You’ve come off a successful first novel (Sunday Times bestseller, Pine) which won various awards and was highly praised.
I think the idea first hit me during lockdown, around 2020, shortly after Pine was published. It was that feeling of isolation in a small flat in London and thinking about wide-open spaces that I’d grown up in: the Scottish Highlands and then in Fife. I was missing some of my close friends from school who I’m still in touch with, and so it was a slightly nostalgic revisiting of that location.
I was also thinking of my old friends and reconnecting with some people, realising that we think everyone and everything is online. There are people you went to school with that you think, ‘I wonder what happened to that person?’, and then you can’t find any trace of them online. That was the starting point for Bluff.
You live in London, but you’re obviously still inspired by Scotland, where you grew up. Why do you think that is?
My partner is Scottish, and my parents still live in Scotland, and sometimes having a bit of distance from the place that you grew up in gives you some perspective on it. I love writing about landscape and the natural world, and in London, there’s not very much of that.
With Bluff, it really made me think about St Andrews as a town, and while I was living there, I took a lot of the architecture for granted. When you move away to a different place, you look at it through a slightly different lens and realise it’s a gothic place with so much history, like the witch trials that took place there, and religious persecution. You wonder what sort of effect that has on people that live there, even to this day.
You’ve said you’re interested in the way things in the past can have a butterfly effect, and you’ve written from two different timelines. Could you talk more about that and why you chose this structure?
I don’t want to give too much away about the ending, but I do like to write in the grey areas, especially when it comes to characterisation and what these characters do.
I really like the idea that actions in the earlier timeline of 2013 could have a knock-on effect 10 years down the line, when Cameron comes back after living in London to St. Rule and tries to piece together the past. Things are affecting him in the present day that might have happened 10 years before, and it feels particularly relevant to a town that is steeped in history and had all these events happening there for centuries.
I am also interested in the idea of memory, and how people remember their past, how they see themselves when someone else might look at them in a completely different way or have a completely different memory of what happened and how that affected them. Or that you could have done something in the past and completely forgotten about it, and for another person that was important to them, and they’ve really held on to that event from the past.
What are your plans for the book?
I have two events at Toppings & Company bookshops, in Edinburgh, and St Andrews, which is exciting, because Bluff was inspired by St Andrews, and the Toppings there.
Bluff is published on 6th November
Photo credit: Sophie Davidson
