I needed to create a whole life for Imogen in Bastard Verdict, and it’s interesting how choices about a character can lead you to other revelations. And there’s no substitute for traveling the paths your characters will walk.

I took two writing courses from the Sci-Fi writer Joanna Russ. She would drill through short story drafts, asking students, “What did the sky look like?” “Where is the sun?” “What are the smells in the air?” She didn’t mean that you had to give a moment-to-moment disquisition on the weather, but that you, the writer, had to know–and SEE–it in order to render a successful scene, regardless of which details you chose to use.

While scouting locations for Bastard Verdict, I was staying in Glasgow’s West End, which was fantastic. And I could see Imogen wanting to be there. I certainly did! And I hoped some of that enthusiasm came through on the page.

She was a visiting scholar at University of Glasgow, and I decided that she should take a one-year lease on a flat on Bentinck Street in Glasgow’s West End. And that she could walk to work at the university (Adam Smith bldg) through beautiful and inspiring Kelvingrove Park–a fifteen to twenty minute walk. It seemed perfect.

A Glaswegian friend said that sounded nice, “but she doesn’t walk through there at night, right?” (I hadn’t thought about that, frankly.)

So, I started out one morning from Bentinck Street and I walked the route in early morning, and again in that night, coming down from campus.

That morning, I entered the park from Kelvingrove Street and ambled through, navigating by keeping the university’s high tower in view. I stopped twice to write down impressions, to make quick, written sketches of what I was seeing, what the air was like, who was about. Coming back through at night, I did not tarry anywhere. I didn’t feel threatened in any way, but I did see that maybe walking through the park late at night would be a mistake. Still, early morning and early evening was lovely.

Looking at the university’s skyline through the trees, I was reminded of Oxford’s “dreaming spires,” which I grew to love when we lived there on two separate occasions.

But there was a difference in the Glasgow University skyline.

So, as Imogen walks through the park with Ian Ross in fading daylight, I wrote:

<<Imogen stopped and turned round to face the main building’s neo-Gothic tower, looming over the park’s trees.

“It’s almost too dark now,” she said to him, “but I love seeing the university from here. I’ve only seen pictures of Oxford University’s ‘dreaming spires,’ but I think I like these better. There’s no dreaming here, but slow-burn energy, dark jets of coal fire poking out over the trees.”

“But not after dark,” said Ross. “Here, I mean.”>>

I liked the image of “jets of coal fire,” because that’s what I saw myself, and it reminded me of my boyhood in Edinburgh. Our tenement didn’t have central heating, only coal fireplaces in the main rooms. As a boy of ten years old, I was endlessly fascinated with the small bursts of coal fire poking through the embers.

As much as I liked it, though, I vacillated over whether to keep the passage in. Though the book’s written in third-person, it’s Imogen’s consciousness, we’re “looking over her shoulder,” and I wondered where (or whether) she’d seen a coal fire. She’s originally from the small town of Ripley, Ohio, right across the Ohio River from Kentucky. (She and Ewan, from Alyth, bond over their small-town experiences.)

Ripley, OH, is a bit west of “coal country.” The bituminous coal seams hew closer to the border with West Virginia. But it’s pretty close.

So I took a leap. I hope it works for readers.

Kelvingrove Park will end up playing yet another role later in the story…

Up next, spare ground and settings for murder.

# # #

Bastard Verdict is available now in paperback, and eReader!

YOU DON’T NEED TO WIN, JUST DON’T LOSE
In politics, people cheat to win, or because they’re afraid to lose. The difference can be deadly.

Imogen will risk what’s left of her standing, her career–and maybe her life–to get at the truth.

James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. To get the details right for the new thriller, he drew on his boyhood in Scotland and scouted locations for scenes in the book while attending Bloody Scotland.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

He’s a member of MWA, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the new president of the Delaware Valley Sisters in Crime chapter. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. His current, work-in-progress is a mystery-thriller set in Oregon’s wine country…A (pinot) Noir, called Witness Tree.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

His most recent short fiction is below. The first is available for online reading.

“Eight O’Clock Sharp” in Retreats from Oblivion: the Journal of NoirCon. (free online)
Set in Philadelphia’s 9th Street Market, Thomas is a man outside of time, forgotten, but trying to do the right thing while contending with avaricious forces.

“Ultimatum Games” in Rock and Hard Place magazine issue #7
A rare book heist, bad decisions. The narrator and his partner-in-crime clash over evolving bourgeois norms.

“Nostalgia” in Low Down Dirty Vote, vol. 3
An armed group tries to resurrect a past that never was as they struggle with change.

I’ve had some lovely notes from readers about the new thriller Bastard Verdict, and one of the things that’s often called out is that they know well the locations I use. During my recent trip to Scotland for Bloody Scotland, I took the opportunity to revisit many of the settings–in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Alyth. I didn’t make it to Dundee on this trip, but I have photos from my original visit in 2019.

In the novel, Imogen Trager, an FBI agent with a PhD in political science, is taking leave from the Bureau as a visiting fellow at University of Glasgow. She’s nervous about this new role, and committed to keeping her nose clean while away. Her inability to do so in the past is one of the reasons her bosses at the Bureau are happy she’s taking this sabbatical.

The Adam Smith Building figures largely in the book. Imogen’s office is broken into there, and her ally Wee Frankie has his office just down the hall. And the story opens there as Imogen gives her inaugural lecture:

<<Anyone with the temerity to look upward into the rain that night on campus would have witnessed a kind of negotiated settlement between light and dark, as the wet Glasgow night held the pale glow from the Adam Smith building’s top floor close in a murky halo.

One man did look up, before sullenly returning to the meager shelter of a young birch tree outside the west entrance to the building. He mopped his face and dabbed his bald head with a handkerchief as he settled back against the tree trunk.

Inside those high windows, brightness reigned, the lecture theatre dazzlingly arid and contemporary. Though it was chilly for all that. Not that Imogen noticed. Within her slow-burn, imposter syndrome panic, she felt flushed, anxious as she began taking questions…>>

Imogen’s barely been in Scotland for a week, when one of her new colleagues, together with a Scottish government official, ask her to look into irregularities in the first Independence referendum.

<<“Maybe you might look at it?” he says. “Unofficially, of course. Because irrespective of what’s been said publicly, a number of us are pretty convinced it was stolen last time. And if this second referendum does go forward, we want to make sure it isn’t stolen again.”

She walks to the department dinner with the official, Ian Ross. Surely, Imogen counters, there must be any number of people qualified to investigate. “Why me?” she asks again.

“It’s delicate,” he said, looking behind them for a moment. “Anyone we might use officially would be embedded in or seconded from the Electoral Commission or the Met. Or both. And they would have to make reports. Once that starts, we couldn’t be certain whom they were telling or where their directives were coming from—a clusterfuck, if I might borrow a vivid American term—of epic proportions.”

Christ, she thought, it sounded a lot like the situation she was running from at the FBI, even if it was delivered in a dulcet Scottish accent…>>

Meanwhile, the bald man who stood vigil outside the Adam Smith building is following them.

That same night, in Dundee, Buff Lindsey, “shop steward” for a local crime syndicate, interrogates and murders a man who had been following him for three days. He learns nothing.

Next up, “dark jets of coalfire.”

# # #

Bastard Verdict is available now in paperback, and eReader!

YOU DON’T NEED TO WIN, JUST DON’T LOSE
In politics, people cheat to win, or because they’re afraid to lose. The difference can be deadly.

Imogen will risk what’s left of her standing, her career–and maybe her life–to get at the truth.

James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. To get the details right for the new thriller, he drew on his boyhood in Scotland and scouted locations for scenes in the book while attending Bloody Scotland.

All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

He’s a member of MWA, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the new president of the Delaware Valley Sisters in Crime chapter. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. His current, work-in-progress is a mystery-thriller set in Oregon’s wine country…A (pinot) Noir, called Witness Tree.

For a full list of appearances and readings, make sure to check out his Events/About page. And follow this blog!

His most recent short fiction is below. The first is available for online reading.

“Eight O’Clock Sharp” in Retreats from Oblivion: the Journal of NoirCon. (free online)
Set in Philadelphia’s 9th Street Market, Thomas is a man outside of time, forgotten, but trying to do the right thing while contending with avaricious forces.

“Ultimatum Games” in Rock and Hard Place magazine issue #7
A rare book heist, bad decisions. The narrator and his partner-in-crime clash over evolving bourgeois norms.

“Nostalgia” in Low Down Dirty Vote, vol. 3
An armed group tries to resurrect a past that never was as they struggle with change.