First appearing in a comic script, submitted on spec to 2000AD magazine in 1992, Detective Inspector Anthony McLean has been around a long while. That story never saw the light of day, although elements of it were rehashed for The Gathering Dark some 25 years later. As a grizzled old detective who’s seen it all, he appeared next in a collaborative comic with Stuart MacBride – As If By Magic – which again failed to find a publisher in the early 1990s.
I used the character in a couple of early novels, both set in Edinburgh an its environs, when I needed a police officer and couldn’t be bothered making anyone else up. Those books are not good enough to be published – every author worth their salt has a number of drawer manuscripts like them – but they served to develop McLean into the detective he is today. A few other characters were birthed in those novels too, most notably the evil Jane Louise Dee, aka Mrs Saifre.
Having begun with Fantasy and SF, I turned my sights on crime fiction as a genre in the early 2000s. Digging up my old detective, I wrote a half dozen short stories to try and work out who he was and how I might write him. The first of these was The Final Reel, which you can read here. Another of those six was called Natural Causes, and I expanded that tale into the novel of the same name.
Natural Causes the novel was shortlisted for the CWA Debut Dagger prize in 2007. It didn’t win, and neither did The Book of Souls, which was shortlisted the following year. Both books gained me the attention of publishing, and I came very close to selling The Book of Souls in 2008. Alas, very close isn’t quite close enough.
I self published Natural Causes and The Book of Souls in 2012, not really expecting them to do much. To my great surprise, they took off – about 350,000 copies being sold or downloaded free in the space of eight months. On the back of that success, Penguin imprint Michael Joseph made me an offer for three books – easy money as by then I’d already written The Hangman’s Song – and the rest, as they say, is history.
There are now fifteen books in the series (including The Violent Hour, published in July 2026). You can click on the list below for individual details:
- Natural Causes
- The Book of Souls
- The Hangman’s Song
- Dead Men’s Bones
- Prayer for the Dead
- The Damage Done
- Written in Bones
- The Gathering Dark
- Cold As The Grave
- Bury Them Deep
- What Will Burn
- All That Lives
- For Our Sins
- The Rest Is Death
- The Violent Hour