Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. - William Wordsworth The Monocle Minute...
Book Review: The Blackhouse by Peter May
In The Blackhouse by Peter May, the setting is the remote, windy, and rainswept Hebrides islands off Scotland’s western coast. The murder is gruesome and mimics a recent killing in Edinburgh being investigated by police detective Fin McLeod.
Fin’s young son has just been killed by a hit-and-run driver. His lukewarm marriage has fallen apart. So he heads to the Isle of Lewis, where he was born and raised, to vent his grief and see if the two murders are connected.
The Blackhouse is rich, dense, and real. More than just a typical whodunit, I got the feeling it was written to illustrate a unique place few have seen and fewer still have truly experienced. Life in the Hebrides is remote and difficult, squeezed between rock and ocean and constantly buffeted by winds which have scoured trees off the land.
The setting is another character, one both capricious and perverse. May often refers to the changing sky, the remorseless wind, and the rage of the ocean and never forgets their impact on a scene. Local customs are rooted in the simple need to survive. Religion is as severe and unforgiving as the wind. Both physical and emotional comforts are luxuries few can afford.
While the setting sets The Blackhouse apart from the majority of tartan noir novels, May also uses flashbacks unlike any mystery author I have read. The book is written in third person, with Fin as the central character. But Fin also narrates many flashbacks of his youth on the Isle of Lewis, which mostly deal with his childhood friend Artair, whose father tutored both of them, and Marsiali, the woman Fin alternately loved and discarded until she finally left him and married Artair.
Fin’s flashbacks don’t come at us in chronological order but are seemingly random (but highly relevant, as we will see) memories prompted by present-day encounters. Fin runs into the unhappily married couple Artair and Marsiali. Artair is now an abusive drunk and his son has gotten a girl pregnant. Donald, another friend, is a clergyman and father of the pregnant girl.
The big climax comes with a hefty dose of local Lewis custom: the annual 12-man trip to a tiny and remote rock in the Atlantic to kill guga sea birds, considered a local delicacy. The custom has been going on since time immemorial and to be included in the guga hunt brotherhood is a rare honor.
It is at this point, we realize what a master storyteller may truly is. He draws all the threads—both from the flashbacks and the present-day murder investigation—into whole cloth as thick and durable as the Harris tweed still woven on the island. The ending is huge and heart-pounding.
The Blackhouse is the first of May’s trilogy about Fin’s return to the Isle of Lewis. All use the flashback device to good effect, although in the second book, The Lewis Man, the flashbacks belong to a man suffering from dementia, which is handled brilliantly. In The Chessmen, we are back to Fin’s flashbacks, most of which deal with his high school days but lack the strength of The Blackhouse’s Artair-Marsiali tension.
May has also collaborated with photographer David Wilson on a small coffee table book of the Hebrides. The book beautifully captures the moody sky and ocean so close to the Arctic Circle and contains excerpts of some of the novels. My one complaint about Hebrides is that occasionally May’s description of the land was on the left facing page and a book excerpt (using a subtly different font) was on the right. The format broke up the continuity of both. But the Hebrides also tells the story of how May, a BBC producer, came to the Hebrides in the first place and their impact on his life.
Verdict: Read these books. Now.
Estelle Ryan: Firstly, thank you so much for having me and also for your kind words. When I developed the series, I spent a lot of time getting to know my characters before I even wrote the first book. I wrote out comprehensive personality and professional profiles on each of them. No matter what crazy crime challenge gets thrown their way or how much each of them grow throughout the series, at their core they're still true to their personalities. Plot points are easy and hard to find. Technology evolves at such an alarming rate, it's not difficult to find new things to include in the mysteries. The difficult part comes in avoiding the very strong temptation of repeating the progression of a mystery in one of the previous books. But that challenge is fun to take on.
ER: The catalyst for Genevieve's most significant growth/transition was when Colin and the other friends entered her life in the first book. She was forced out of her comfort zone of isolation and had to learn to trust and share. Adding the presence of Nikki, the student who elicits very strong protective tendencies in Genevieve also shook her to her core. I think all of us have experienced such events that took us to uncharted emotional territories and forced us to grow and often face our own fears.
Not much is left. The binder with the penultimate draft, the one I marked up with red pen. A dozen sticky notes on the wall above my desk with details I want to change or add. Scraps of paper clipped together representing inspiration while in the grocery store or nearly asleep or in the coffee shop. At least one large spiral notebook filled with scenes written longhand.
As an aside, for years I've kept all of the spiral notebooks filled with story notes and at present count have 11. I taped peso coins to the front of some of them, a sort of fung shui for authors who write about Mexico. I keep thinking that when I'm astronomically famous, I'll auction them off for charity. Dream big or go home, right?
