Eight years ago this month, Graeme Macrae Burnet announced himself as a Scottish author of note when his tricksy historical crime novel His Bloody Project contested the 2016 Man Booker Prize.

He didn’t win on the night, but by then his book had sold twice as many copies as the novel which did, and he had broken new ground by becoming the first Scot to be shortlisted with a novel from a Scottish publisher – Contraband, an imprint of then Glasgow-based Saraband.

In 2022, the Kilmarnock-born author again came to the attention of the Booker judges with Case Study. It employs a series of Burnetian conceits – notebooks, apparently genuine historical sources and an editor signing himself GMB (get it?) – to tell the story of a controversial 1960s psychiatrist and former acolyte of feted, Glasgow-born psychiatrist RD Laing.

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Less well known, perhaps, is that interspersed between those titles were two linked crime novels: The Disappearance Of Adèle Bedeau, published in 2014, and The Accident On The A35, from 2017. Now comes A Case Of Matricide, the final part of this so-called Saint-Louis trilogy and once again featuring solitary, heavy-drinking detective Georges Gorski.

The trilogy’s unofficial name comes from the setting: Saint-Louis, a real town of 22,000 people located on the French side of the border with Switzerland.

“It’s actually regarded as a suburb of Basel, though it’s in France,” Macrae Burnet tells me when we talk. “A lot of people commute across the Border and that was true when I first visited in the year 2000.”

King Street looking south in Kilmarnock King Street looking south in Kilmarnock 

Flat, cold and grey, it was the town’s stoutly unremarkable nature which appealed to him when he went there with a Basel-based friend. That and the fact the experience plunged him into the world of one of his favourite authors – Belgian writer Georges Simenon.

“Simenon’s brilliant on provincial France and small town France. So when I first visited Saint-Louis, I felt like I was in a Simenon novel. I saw the characters around me in the restaurant, La Cloche as it appears in the book. I saw them as characters in a Simenon novel and that’s how the whole thing started. I just wrote down what I saw, and then imagined the lives of these people and their petty resentments and feelings of guilt and self-consciousness.”

The border town of Saint-Louis chimed with Macrae Burnet in other ways too, however.

“It made me wonder about the people who remain there,” he says. “That’s tied up with my own feelings about growing up in Kilmarnock. This isn’t a reflection on Kilmarnock, but it’s a small town and I felt it to be constricting. I thought there must be a world beyond Kilmarnock and all I wanted to do as a teenager was to get the f*** out of there. So there’s a feeling of constriction in small towns and a desire to escape. But Gorski’s the guy who didn’t escape.”

Resentment, guilt, self-consciousness, constriction, introspection. These things are part of the DNA of the Saint-Louis trilogy, but the novels themselves are very from being a slavish (or even near) copy of Simenon’s oeuvre. Instead Macrae Burnet brings his own style and flavour to the party.

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For a start, the novels purport to have actually been written by one Raymond Brunet, who was born in Saint-Louis in 1953 and died there in 1992 when he threw himself in front of a train. Brunet supposedly wrote only one novel, The Disappearance Of Adèle Bedeau, which was a sensation and was filmed by French New Wave legend Claude Chabrol in 1982 (Isabelle Adjani starred).

In various forewords and afterwords, Macrae Burnet introduces himself as Brunet’s translator and reveals how two subsequent manuscripts came to be discovered and published. These saw the light of day as The Accident On The A35 – and now, of course, A Case Of Matricide.

Adding another layer of authorial veiling, A Case Of Matricide also features a novelist called Robert Duymann. Eagle-eyed readers will see the name for what it is – an anagram of Raymond Brunet – but if they don’t, Macrae Burnet the jobbing translator helpfully points it out.

As for the case itself, it turns on a suspicious death or two, a lost dog, a woman convinced her son is trying to kill her and a mysterious guest who turns up at a Saint-Louis hotel and works his way under Gorski’s skin. As the small town detective sups beer at his table in preferred drinking spot Le Pot, or takes lunch and a carafe (or two) of red in Restaurant de la Cloche, he chews over leads which might not be leads, asks question which may or may not have answers and might not even be questions.

He also dwells on his own problems. An ex-wife, an ex-father-in-law who also happens to be the town’s mayor, an ailing mother and a daughter who is soon to leave for university – and how to manage his feelings for willowy, married Madame Beck, whose flower shop is below his flat.

Genre is what gives the Saint-Louis novels their grounding, but it’s their author’s textual and conceptual sleight of hand which propels them into the realm of literary fiction. And although structurally playful – and maybe even disorientating – they also delve into the darkest corners of the human psyche, while the stories themselves revel in a pleasing ambiguity. As does Macrae Burnet.

'I never tie everything up neatly''I never tie everything up neatly' (Image: Kirsty Anderson)

“I never tie everything up neatly, precisely because I want there to be some questions remaining for the reader to resolve themselves,” he says. “We’re left wondering – that is my ambition as a writer. I have this conversation over and over again with readers … People think the author knows the truth. In my opinion the author can take a view on the material there, but it doesn’t have to be definitive. But if the author expresses a view, people do take it as definitive. So I’m constantly struggling against that.”

He tells me about a recent book event where an audience member asked him about the ending of The Disappearance Of Adèle Bedeau.

“What I said is: ‘When you closed the book, did you fall asleep straight away or did you lie awake wondering what had happened?’ She said she was awake. I said: ‘That’s what I want’.”

For fans of the Saint-Louis cycle, more sleepless nights await.

A Case Of Matricide is out now (Contraband, £14.99)