James Oswald, Alex Gray and Helen Sedgwick on crime fiction after Sarah Everard

The March 13 vigil had been refused a permit by the Met because of those same restrictions. Women turned up anyway. Shortly after 6pm they gathered around the bandstand and speeches began, only for the police to attempt to break the vigil up with force, demanding those attending disperse and threatening any who didn’t with arrest.

One woman, student Patsy Stevenson, was forced to the ground. The image of her being held down by police flashed around the world.

Nearly 500 miles north James Oswald saw it and was horrified. Oswald is a writer of crime fiction. Starting with Natural Causes, published in 2012, he has written 12 novels set in Edinburgh featuring Inspector Tony McLean. The latest, All That Lives, has just been published.

The Met’s response to the vigil, Oswald admits, brought him up short and even made him question his choice of work. “I thought, ‘This is just wrong. It’s so obviously wrong,’” the author recalls nearly a year later.

“There’s that very famous photo of the red-headed lady with her mask on in a headlock, pinned down, and you think, ‘Why are they doing that to her? Something has gone very wrong here and I don’t want to be part of the wrong thing,’” he says.

“I was just thinking, ‘How can I write stories that big up the police when they behave like this?’”

In the wake of the vigil Oswald went on Twitter to say as much. It is those tweets that have brought me to his home in Fife today.

James Oswald on his farm (Image: Duncan McGlynn)

It’s a Friday afternoon in February, the day clear and bright and beautiful. Oswald lives on a 350-acre farm that looks over the River Tay. Over the last five years he has built himself a home after years spent living with his partner Barbara in a caravan (until a barn collapsed on it during a storm).

“We’re not really finished yet,” Oswald says of his home. But the part that is would no doubt receive approval from Kevin McCloud. A wall of glass frames a spectacular view up the Tay towards Perth.

Oswald’s backstory is a fascinating one. He is an author who is also a farmer. He’s the writer who struggled year after year to get published and in the end published himself and suddenly found himself a best-selling author.

But I’ve come to talk to him principally today about crime fiction and morality, and about how a writer reflects the world he sees around him and how the real world impacts on what he (in this case) writes.

These are questions for the reader too, of course. Driving up the A92 I find myself thinking again about some of them. How many women, I wonder, have died for my entertainment over the years? How many books have I opened, how many TV shows have I watched, which begin with the discovery of a woman’s body?

Oswald’s latest book All That Lives, the 12th Inspector Tony McLean novel, does not begin this way, although the remains of a woman who went missing 30 years before is found during the course of the novel. It’s a book that takes in dangerous drugs, the interaction of public and private sector in contemporary policing and urban planning in Edinburgh.

(Oswald is clearly not a fan of the new St James Quarter. “The first time I saw it I was in St Andrew Square, and you look over the Bank of Scotland and there’s this bronze dog turd,” he says when I bring it up.)

The book is an entertaining page-turner that never feels queasily voyeuristic as some crime fiction can. But if you ask him to do some stocktaking Oswald will admit he’s not sure that this has always been true of his books.

“Natural Causes has got some quite nasty, murdery descriptions in it,” he admits today. “I was a baby writer then. I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

The truth is, though, so much of crime fiction can be mapped to the female body (and the mutilation of the female body). “It’s absolutely relentless the killing of women, the torture of women in crime fiction,” Helen Sedgwick, author of The Burrowhead Mysteries trilogy (the last of which. What Doesn’t Break Us, will be published this summer), tells me when I speak to her.

Oswald is all too aware of this. He asks me if I’ve heard of the term “fridging”. I haven’t. It’s a term reportedly popularised by the comic book writer Gail Simone, and it refers back to a comic in which Green Lantern’s girlfriend is stuffed in the fridge.

“Basically, a woman dies horribly to give your male protagonist his motivation and that’s all the woman exists for,” Oswald explains.

“And I hold my hand up. Definitely guilty of that in my earlier books before I thought more deeply about it.

“It’s a very quick and easy shorthand for giving your male character motivation for going the extra mile. ‘Look, they’ve murdered this poor woman horribly.’

“But we don’t know anything about this woman. She has had no agency at all in the book.”

This is an issue that concerns Sedgwick too. Writing her Burrowhead Mysteries, she says she has tried hard not to fall into that trap. “I certainly did not want to have a female body without giving that person a voice.”

Oswald feels the same. He hopes he is no longer guilty of fridging. “I always try to put more background and life into the victim rather than just these cut-out characters. I like to focus more on the victims now than I used to in the earlier books.”

Oswald and I are speaking the day after Cressida Dick has resigned (or been made to resign) as the head of the Met. That resignation came shortly after the revelation of a “toxic” culture at Charing Cross police station, with officers accused of bullying, sexism, racism and homophobia.

As such, the police are a hot topic. And one of the reasons crime fiction fascinates is because of the way it can reflect contemporary concerns that are at the heart of the culture.

A couple of days before I go to see Oswald I have a chat with Alex Gray, who has been writing crime novels featuring her detective DSI Lorimer for 20 years now and she makes this very point.

“It is a perfect vehicle for that. I think it was Val [McDermid] who said more than once it holds up a mirror to society more than any other genre.”

The danger, Oswald feels, is that while crime fiction can get right to the heart of society’s problems, it can also gloss over them as well.

“One of the things that worried me about the Sarah Everard case was here I am making my team of police officers the heroes of the tale. And, yes, you have some bad ones, but at the end of the day the police prevail, and justice is seen to be done.

“And that doesn’t necessarily reflect what is happening at the moment.

“We’ve got this culture in the police that seems to be skewed the wrong way now. It’s becoming ever more of a boys’ club and less of a public service. That’s how it appears sometimes.

“The problem is you see the bad stuff in the news, and you think that’s everything that’s happening, whereas the vast majority of police officers are just trying to do their best in really trying circumstances.”

It’s important to remember also, of course, that both Oswald and Alex Gray’s fictional heroes do not work for the Met. Police Scotland is a different organisation. From the extensive research she puts into each of her books, Gray believes that vetting in Police Scotland is very stringent.

“One of the things that impressed me was the fact that every potential recruit has their social media investigated very thoroughly to ensure that any candidate who looks promising doesn’t have anything adverse in their social media,” she says.

Alex Gray

Oswald agrees with her on this. “It's less of a documented problem in Police Scotland,” he admits.

The ultimate question, though, is whether he ever considered stopping writing about Inspector McLean altogether after the Sarah Everard vigil? Did he actively consider bringing a stop to “bigging up” the police?

“Well, basically, I had to keep writing crime fiction because I was contractually obliged to,” he points out. “But it made me reflect on the situation. We need to be a bit more nuanced when we are portraying the police service. It is a flawed organisation, and it is institutionally racist and sexist and that needs to be reflected in the characters. Some of them are really good people and some of them are unpleasant people.”

The truth is, he says, crime fiction is flexible enough to handle and explore these contradictions.

“I think there is a way through this. If I was to say, ‘Right, I’m never going to write a policeman again,’ that’s ducking away from the problem. I’ve got 12 police procedurals that lionise the police and I’m going to walk away from it? Those books are still there, and I have a big audience, and I can write books that look into the situation.

“But, actually, going in there and, rather than writing that the police are brilliant, actually portray them as the sometimes flawed, sometimes heroic characters that they are and try to find out where things go wrong and why, that can be an interesting story itself.”

Alex Gray

“THERE always will be bad apples [in the police force]. When I was a young mum, a very long time ago, I got nasty, sadistic, nuisance calls. We changed to ex-directory and we kept getting them and that’s when CID found that the perpetrator was somebody in British Telecom. I remember the officer saying to me afterwards that in every large organisation you’re going to get a rotten apple. And that includes the police. In some of my books I have a rotten police officer and nobody in Police Scotland has said, ‘You cannae do that.’

“My character Lorimer is an example of a good man, an example of the kind of police officer I have met so often; good, decent, honorable, someone who values integrity and justice.”

Helen Sedgwick

“I WAS furious [about the Met’s response to the Sarah Everard vigil]; The inequality, the injustice, the horror of it, the backdrop of in-jokes and systemic misogyny that came to light. And the complete failure of the Met to respond with humanity.

“And it's not just one case, of course, it was not an isolated incident. Time and again we have seen examples of police brutality, of police injustice, of institutional sexism and racism, followed by a total lack of any meaningful change.

“That’s something that bothers me about crime fiction. You feel that there is a resolution when the criminal is caught. One crime is done, one criminal is responsible and that solves the problem. And to me the problem is deeper than that.

“It's a brilliant genre to explore all these issues. I think we just have to be very mindful that we’re not trying to suggest easy answers.”

All That Lives by James Oswald, published by Wildfire, £16.99. The new DCI Lorimer novel Echo of the Dead by Alex Gray is published by Sphere on March 3, priced £14.99. Alex Gray and Helen Sedgwick are both appearing at Granite Noir next week. For details, visit aberdeenperformingarts.com