Graeme Macrae Burnet’s creative mind has taken residence in France as he finishes off the final work in his Detective Gorski trilogy. But as fans await the paperback release of his latest novel Case Study, the author tells Lorraine Wilson of plans to locate his next work among the streets of Prague, a city where he taught just after the fall of the Iron Curtain

For the bookworms among us, authors are the rock stars. As music fans lost their gigs at the height of the pandemic, avid readers also lost their author events and book festivals. And like musicians, authors lost that valuable connection with their audiences and the opportunity to promote new releases.


When Case Study, the latest novel by Graeme Macrae Burnet was released last October, things were looking up – Omicron was yet to come.
“Of course events are the lifeblood of getting a book in front of the public and I did get a chance to do a few,” says Graeme. “Some of them were very last minute, however, because people weren’t really committing – they didn’t know how many people could be invited. For events like Waterstones in Glasgow, the restriction in numbers meant we split the event over two nights.” Case Study is Graeme Macrae Burnet’s fourth novel. His first, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau in 2014 is set in small-town France and introduced the detective Georges Gorski. It is far from the typical detective novel.


His second, from 2015, is the book that thrust Graeme into the public eye with its shortlisting for the Booker Prize. The backdrop to His Bloody Project is a brutal triple murder in a remote Scottish Highland community during the 1860s. The third, in 2017, saw the return of Georges Gorski The Accident on the A35 in the same setting as Adèle Bedeau.
Case Study, which is published in paperback on April 14, heads to London in the 1960s and what could be described as the “anti-psychiatry” movement. A woman who believes a psychotherapist has driven her sister to suicide becomes a patient of his under a false name to see if her suspicions are true. The novel is told through notebooks and observations, drawing the reader deeper into this world and the relationship. It’s much more amusing, in places, than this makes it sound. What’s clear, however is Graeme Macrae Burnet isn’t an author who can be stuck in any genre’s pigeonhole.


All of Graeme’s books have been published by Saraband (or its Contraband imprint), a company that formed in Connecticut in the 1990s, relocated to Scotland in 2000 and moved to Salford in 2017.
The attention that a book like His Bloody Project brings an author will inevitably be a large blip on the radar of much larger international publishers, but as Graeme explains there are many factors to take into consideration when choosing a publisher.
“It was absolutely the right decision to stay with Saraband for this book,” he says. “In any author’s career there’s a time to test the waters with other publishers. This was my juncture, and I did get a really fantastic offer from one big London publisher and from another big indie. Saraband also made a great offer.
“I tried to take the emotion out of making the decision, but with the long-standing relationship that we have and the amazing marketing plan they had for the book I knew we could work well together. They were collaborative about aspects like cover design, so in the end it was really a very easy decision to make. It’s so important to have a strong independent publishing sector and even though Saraband is now based in Manchester, I think that Sara Hunt, the publisher, still thinks of Saraband is essentially a Scottish publishing company.”


Working with a successful smaller publisher also meant that there was no pressure to become a “genre” author. There has been no pressure to follow up any of the books with more of the same. From a sort-of detective novel set in a small town in France, to a 19th-century murder story in the Highlands, then back to that small town in France and now 1960s London. 
“I’ve only acquired an agent relatively recently and I told them that all I really want to do is write books. I think it can make it difficult for publishers if you’re not a brand in some way. I think there are some similarities between all my books. There’s a familiarity of approach; of how you express things and inevitably you bring your own sensibility to whatever the raw material is.”


Graeme is currently back in small town France (while still at home in Glasgow) and working on the final book of in the Gorski trilogy, but there are also plans to venture deep into Central Europe.
As an English teacher, Graeme spent time living in France, Spain and the Czech Republic and it’s his time in pre-stag heaven Prague that might well inform that journey further east.
He agrees that location can be another crucial character in a book and as a writer there’s a tendency to be hyper-aware of surroundings.
“As a writer that’s a gift isn’t it? I lived in Prague for a year and I learned some Czech, but not enough to have a serious conversation. This was back in 1990, before the advent of cheap flights and at the time there weren’t many foreigners living there.


“It was a really formative experience and so interesting to be in a place at the moment of genuine transition; things were changing on a weekly basis. To get there I had to go to London to get a visa from the Czechoslovakian Embassy. The Iron Curtain had fallen of course, but a lot of the structures were still in place. It’s probably changed so much but in my mind are the winding medieval streets in winter. Dashing between bars, getting a little grog in each. Everything looks like an old sort of Sherlock Holmes film really.”


What he will write he says isn’t even a half-formed idea and it might be a fictionalised central European destination but it’s clear his memories of the time are vivid. “It’s still in my imagination and I’ve just finished re-reading The Trial by Franz Kafka so it’s at the forefront of my mind.”
For the moment, however, it’s planning to get out and share the paperback of Case Study at events, including a return to the Highlands for the Ullapool Book Festival in May. He spent time as a child at his grandmother’s house in Wester Ross so it’s another area he knows well.
“I think we’ve all been glad to get away from our own front doors recently. I spend so much of my time alone, it goes with the job of course, that I like being among people. Let the conversations begin.” 


Case Study is released on paperback on April 14, published by Saraband.