Interview: Frances Crawford on Giving the Victim a Voice in ‘A Bad, Bad Place’

Often, the best debut novels introduce readers to people and places you may have not have encountered on the page before. Frances Crawford’s A Bad, Bad Place does just that, setting events in Glasgow’s Possilpark with two memorable central protagonists who cross generations, establishing an exciting new voice in Scottish crime fiction. SNACK spoke to Frances to find out more.

Can you tell us about A Bad, Bad Place?

It’s a crime novel set in Possilpark, in the north of Glasgow, in 1979, and it’s about a dog walker. You hear this right across the crime genre, that ‘Who found the body?’ question. ‘Oh, it was a dog walker.’ They take their name and send them home. But I’ve always been really uneasy about what happened to the dog walker next, and this is that story.

In the novel, the dog walker is 12-year-old Janey. She lives in Possilpark with her nana, Maggie, and it’s a dual narrative shared between the two all through the story. It’s the fallout from Janey’s discovery of a mutilated body. She becomes tangled up in the police investigation, and she gets dragged into gossip and the media. Everyone’s interested in what Janey saw.

Was it difficult or easy to jump between the two voices?

I had to make sure that the way they spoke was slightly different. Maggie’s got this more old-fashioned Glaswegian way of speaking than Janey. She uses words like ‘bahookie’ and ‘weans’. Children speak differently from their parents and especially from grandparents.

I was quite conscious of that, and making sure that what they spoke about was also appropriate for their age. I did not want Janey to be too precocious. She’s a wee girl.

What happens to Janey is traumatic. Was that difficult to write?

It was. It’s not something I’ve ever experienced myself, and I did do research on children who had gone through traumatic experiences and on people who had actually found a dead body. I discovered this really odd connection between the person and the body.

If it had been a violent death, the person who found them would follow the case. They might go to court and follow the police investigation. If it was natural causes, they might go to the funeral. They have this feeling that the body somehow belongs to them. And children are very, very like that.

Janey becomes attached to the dead girl. That allowed me to make the dead girl, Samantha, a character of her own. As Janey investigates Samantha, she wants to find out everything she can. She’s not just ‘the dead woman’ – she’s a flawed, nice person. Quite often they’re just a body. Even on TV police shows, it’s that whole ‘beautiful dead girl’ trope. I was very, very keen to avoid that. I hope I’ve done that.

And why that time and place?

I set it in 1979 in part to show how flawed the police were – I could show poor treatment of victims, victim-shaming, things like that – but really it’s because the music in 1979 was so good. I filled the novel with punk rock. But there’s also been a huge leap in things like forensics since then. That was another good reason for setting it in the 70s, because I know nothing about forensics. They might have had a couple of sniffer dogs and that would be enough. There’s also a question of how much, or how little, has changed. 

The police treat the victims badly; the newspapers are very interested in Samantha, who was this beautiful young woman. There’s a lot of that sort of victim-shaming which still goes on, so I hope people will see the parallels and that, although it is set in the late 70s, a lot of things have not improved.

This is your debut novel. What has been your experience of getting published?

I had no experience of publishing whatsoever, so every single stage has been a surprise. And some a lot nicer than others. But my publishing team have been great – I’ve been really lucky to have them. To be honest, I’d never planned on being a writer. I’d never planned on writing a novel. I went back to university when my kids were grown up. It was that point where you have to decide – am I getting a motorbike, or am I doing something safer? So I did a postgraduate in creative writing, which is a wee bit safer.

Do you have any advice for others looking to get published?

I would say to anyone who’s even got a vague idea of writing to find a writing group. Even a wee course at the library, an online course, find a WhatsApp group – anything where you will get feedback, anything where you will interact with other writers. Anyone that will say to you, you know, ‘that’s a pile of shite’, or ‘that’s really good’. You need backup and feedback.

A Bad, Bad Place is published on the Bantam imprint of Penguin Books