Private Passions

Stuart MacBride was born in Dumbarton and raised in Aberdeen; abandoning his studies to become an architect, he went to work on the oil rigs, scrubbing toilets. He then tried out careers as an actor, a web designer, and a computer programmer, all the while writing away after work – he wrote four novels before his first, Cold Granite, was published in 2005. Since then, he’s become one of our most successful and prolific crime writers, with twenty-four titles in all, sometimes labelled as “tartan noir”. His latest, about the hunt for a serial killer, is called No Less the Devil. Reviewers say things like “this isn’t a novel to read over dinner”, or “slick, gruesome and brutally intelligent.” Gruesome crime-writing apart, Stuart MacBride’s other notable achievements include winning Celebrity Mastermind (his subject was A.A. Milne) and coming first in the World Stovies Championship. In conversation with Michael Berkeley, Stuart MacBride reveals how his “very dull” childhood developed his imagination as a writer