Crime fiction and whisky: aspects of Scotland’s culture which have come to help define the modern nation. Bringing the two together, as Natalie Jayne Clark has for her debut novel, The Malt Whisky Murders, was always going to grab attention. However, the resulting thriller is so much more than that original premise suggests.
How do you describe The Malt Whisky Murders to people?
Imagine your and your partner’s dream has come true – moving somewhere beautiful, albeit quite remote. Escaping the rat race of the city and beginning the next stage of your life together, to make history in running the first women-owned whisky distillery in Scotland, maybe even disrupt the whole male-dominated industry – and two of the barrels from the 1970s you hoped might make you a load of cash actually contain the bodies of two men from decades ago, preserved in the whisky.
What would you do? They decide to hide the bodies, but it turns them both a bit obsessive and mad and away from each other. And of course it’s not easy keeping something that big secret, especially wondering whether the murderer might come back now you’ve reopened the old place. There’s a lot about the history and craft of whisky in the book, and women’s part in it.
Polygon acquired the rights to the novel after you pitched the idea at the Bloody Scotland festival. Can you talk a bit about that?
A handful of us had been selected from loads of applicants to pitch in person at the festival. I rewrote and rehearsed my two-and-a-half-minute pitch over and over again, and treated it more like a performance. The audience included agents, editors, and publicists, and it was one of the latter who passed on my details to Alison Rae, senior editor at Birlinn. The pitch was the Sunday, Alison asked for my first three chapters on Monday, and by the Friday I had a pre-emptive book deal and the legendary Jenny Brown as my agent.
How did you develop the novel from that initial idea in terms of structure and plot?
Brandon Sanderson talks about promise, progress, and payoff, and how everything in a novel – from tone, to characters, to plot threads, are subject to all of these in the reader’s mind and journey through the book. For example, one thread was the renovation of the distillery, something to come back to and track throughout. I loved Iain Banks’ use of alternating chapters written in the second person in Complicity and had always thought, one day, whenever I hopefully wrote a book, I might emulate that. When it came to writing this I thought that would be a cool way to maintain the mystery of the murderer. It made it much easier to structure, actually, plotting out what I wanted revealed in the ‘You’ chapters and having the ‘Eilidh’ chapters work with them.
The novel has a memorable cast, especially your central protagonists. How did you approach creating your characters?
I knew I wanted aspects that marked them out from each other, and my protagonist came first and was the one I could see most clearly. I thought about Eilidh’s gestures, phrases, habits, how others treated her, her preferences, and then thought about how other people might be different in all of those elements, even opposite in some cases. A lot of the characters appeared as I was writing the scenes, and were tweaked or even amalgamated to serve the story, Eilidh, Morag, and ‘You’ – they were the central priority around which everything else was built.
As well as murders, there is a lot of whisky. Was this a case of ‘write what you know’, or the result of significant research?
A combination of both. As soon as I learned whisky wasn’t just some homogenous strong drink that was reserved for old men, that each one has its own tale, with strong links to the land and people of its provenance, that it was a complex craft, I was hooked. That was about fifteen years ago, and since then I’ve visited a lot of distilleries, drunk a lot of drams, and gained a Whisky Ambassador qualification. When it then came to writing the book, I delved back into my old notes and had the wonderful excuse to learn even more.
Finally – and perhaps the key question – are there whiskies you would recommend?
There is a whisky for every occasion, and I want to emphasise that you can and absolutely should experiment with whisky cocktails and not constrain yourself to only drinking it straight. A beautifully mellow all-rounder for sharing at a board game night might be an Auchentoshan – their Three Wood in particular. If you’re looking for something to gesticulate with in a rowdy good-natured gossip and debate, I’d say any of the Taliskers, salty and smoky. For a lovely spot of reading, perhaps with my book even, you can’t go wrong with The Classic Laddie from Bruichladdich. If you’re ever making a hot toddy, my recommendation is to use chai tea for an extra dash of spice and warmth.
The Malt Whisky Murders is out now, published by Polygon. Available here.
All Photos credit Lydia Smith
