I’M troubled by the fate that has befallen Altany Craik, the Fife Labour councillor who had sought to become his party’s candidate in next year’s General Election.

Mr Craik, it seems, has been defrocked owing to his somewhat abstruse sideline writing “sexy and satanic” novels.

Let’s leave aside for the moment that possessing intimate knowledge of sex and Satanism is surely something of an asset when preparing for a career in Scottish and UK politics. 

Among the many noms de guerre applied to the devil is the “Father of Lies”, an honorific suggesting Auld Nick would feel right at home in Westminster or Holyrood.

The hero of Mr Craik’s novels is Father Andrew Steel, a priest who, having the second sight, deploys it to solve high crimes rooted in the black arts.  

My esteemed Herald colleague Neil Mackay has rightly observed that a name such as Altany Craik carries its own pleasingly esoteric timbre. 

Indeed, it reminds me of Canon Copley-Syle, a satanic old padre whose vile stratagems added a dash of crimson Roman glamour to the black magic books of Dennis Wheatley, the UK’s “prince of thriller” writer, throughout the 1950s and 1960s. 

Mr Wheatley’s fascination with the occult inspired such classics as The Devil Rides Out, To The Devil A Daughter and Gateway To Hell. 

Curiously, during childhood holidays in Girvan, I discovered that Mr Wheatley’s entire satanic works could be found on the shelves of the town’s library and thus my own lifelong inquisitiveness regarding matters of the preternatural began. 

I’ve often since wondered if this desquamated old South Ayrshire resort lies on some infernal and mystical ley line connected with ancient rites. 

I shall now inspect Mr Craik’s dark literary output but in the meantime I urge the Labour party to move heaven and perhaps even hell to get him back on their candidates’ list. 

I feel sure, too, that Scotland’s deeply misunderstood devil-worshipping community will have been triggered by the treatment of Mr Craik and that it risks needlessly marginalising them further. 

The Herald:

Heavenly days 
SOMEWHAT counter-intuitively, my interest in matters of the occult led to a year-long misadventure studying for the Catholic priesthood in Kilwinning, another ancient Ayrshire burgh with its own recherché cultural associations.  

The seminary was run by the Sacred Heart Fathers, a little-known French order which specialised in sending clergy to serve the Lord in the world’s jaggy and war-torn regions. 

Looking back, I think this urge may have been rooted in a romantic notion of living among indigenous communities in the jungles of South American and helping them rise up against the evil CIA-backed contras. 

And then dying in a hail of Ronald Reagan’s bullets in the middle of the Amazon, thus attaining martyrdom, bypassing the fires of purgatory and securing direct ingress to heaven no danger whatsoever.

The two beneficent fathers who managed this priest school deployed an agreeably insouciant and indulgent approach to the manifold vicissitudes that come with the human condition. 

When one of them enquired gently as to why I had brought Dennis Wheatley’s satanic back catalogue with me to the seminary he was quite relaxed about it. 

He told me that the Vatican trained selected candidates in exorcism and suggested that I might be interested in diversifying into this hidden sector of the church’s ministry. 

To my adolescent mind this seemed enchanting. 

What was there not to like about doing battle with the Earl of Hell and casting out his demonic acolytes in some of the planet’s most sinfully alluring resorts?

I was sure, too, that were I occasionally to succumb to Satan’s empty blandishments, the Lord would regard this as an occupational hazard and help me back on the path of righteousness. 

For God’s sake
SADLY, while the two good fathers were indulgent and kindly, they couldn’t forever be expected to turn a blind eye to my increasingly idiosyncratic interpretation of God’s salvific plan. 

Thus, I was summoned one day in May and told gently that “perhaps the Lord wants you to toil in a different part of His vineyard”.

It was the most elegant and gentle means of telling me that while they felt sure God valued my brief contribution to the cause, it was time we all stopped kidding ourselves on. 

Stan back
ANOTHER much-valued Herald colleague, Robert McNeil, was occasionally moved to reference Satan in some of his columns. Mr McNeil, however, preferred to call him Stan, a whimsical appellation which reduced me to fits whenever it appeared. 

This had unfortunate consequences once when I was fulfilling my role as godfather at the christening of my friend’s newborn son. 

Thus, when the priest asked us all to reaffirm our faith, I could only hear: “Do you renounce Stan and all his empty promises” and had to apologise profusely afterwards for giggling at such a solemn moment.