by Ed James
The screaming as the car started rolling down the hill - before their voice had given out - would stay with him. He was told that they would still be unconscious until near the bottom of the hill - if at all - but clearly they'd come round already. While he was still committing the same crime, he didn't need the constant reminder.
The vehicle came to a halt, crumpled and ruined, sitting on its roof.
He jogged back to his Land Rover, to the grinning face in the passenger seat, ready for his own descent down the hill. He knew that he'd have to call the police in before too long.
Afterword
That's book three done and dusted, and now you've just read it. Thanks for sticking with this series - the reaction to the first two has really staggered me and is fuel to writing more.
This one has had a very interesting gestation.
It started with a competition - Bloody Scotland, the Scottish crime writing festival, had a short story competition with a theme of "Worth the wait" and sponsored by a distillery. Within a minute I had the germ of an idea - the body in the barrel and the motive. I did a lot of research into whisky - unlike Cullen, I cannot stand the stuff, I'm much more of a red wine, real ale and continental lager drinker (okay, so the latter is like Cullen) - and started to understand the process of making whisky, from malting through distillation and barrel-making through to bottling. I wrote the short story called WHISKY IN THE JAR - 3,000 words - and I submitted it in June.
I didn't win.
Given the amount of research that I had done and I had the full Crombie dynasty plotted out (even if I didn't use it), I thought that it would work as a novella to bridge the gap between DEVIL IN THE DETAIL and DYED IN THE WOOL. So I extended it, mostly when I was getting through the editing of DEVIL, bumping it up to 27,000 words. I gave it to my alpha readers (C and Pat) and the feedback wasn't as positive as I'd have liked - the idea and the story were good, but it missed that certain Cullen-ness of the first two - and much Bain nonsense - and focused a lot on the deep history rather than the present. Ultimately, the story wasn't that enthralling.
So, back to the drawing board - I jotted down some ideas and quickly realised that I had enough (and enough good stuff) for a full length novel. I'd started to hate the title, so renamed it to FIRE IN THE BLOOD. I wrote it pretty quickly and got it up to what you see now, 84,000 words.
The big learning for me there is that I'm not a short form fiction guy, but I seem to do okay at long form.
As ever, there are a few things I made up in this book. Dunpender Distillery doesn't exist and is entirely fictional. Garleton still doesn't exist, and I drove up that way at the weekend. The site of Leith Walk station is still a derelict plot.
Thanks again go to C for the amazing cover art and the alpha and beta editing. Also, thanks go to Pat for the editing help from the novella to the final novel.
Now, it's onto DYED IN THE WOOL for me before I get stuck into a vampire thriller I've plotted out and am itching to write. I promise that I won't set in any more books in East Lothian for a while...
Thanks again for buying and reading this - do let me know what you think of my books.
Ed James
East Lothian, January 2013