A Crime Writer's Dundee
I’ve always had an affinity with Dundee even though I don’t live there. My home base is in Angus, approximately 35 miles from Dundee city centre, 35 minutes by train, not much longer by car, and lots longer by bus.
I’m not even a Scot, although I’ve always considered myself one, for I was born in Wiltshire to an English mother and Scottish father. I was only 2 years old when we moved to Scotland and I’ve been here ever since.
I was 9 when Mum and Dad split up. Mum kept my younger sister and I got Dad, with Gran landing for the responsibility of bringing me up. Not that I minded, I doted on my dad and loved my gran.
Holidays were spent in Dundee where I sampled the delights of strawberry sauce on my ice cream cones, chips that came in a twist of paper instead of the usual paper bag, and second hand comics and books from poky little shops in the old Overgate. I was an avid reader even then.
Our holiday accommodation was a top floor flat in Cochrane Street, where a friend of my gran’s lived. The circular stair, winding up inside its stone turret and leading onto an open landing bordered by iron railings, known in Dundee as a plattie, always fascinated me. We didn’t have tenements like that in Montrose. Cochrane Street is no longer there, neither is the street next to it where the steamie was. That was another thing we didn’t have in Montrose – steamies. I would imagine that both are now buried under the roundabout at the top of the Marketgait, just past police headquarters.
Times were different when I was a child, cars were less common and you had to be rich to afford one, so folks only ventured away from home on high days and holidays. But come every Holiday Monday we fought our way onto packed trains and headed for Dundee. That was where we bought our spring outfits and winter clothes.
When I left school the most important thing at that time was being able to earn a wage, so it didn’t bother me that I had no qualifications. Girls didn’t have careers back then. It was shop work, office work, nursing, or the factory, and I did the lot except for nursing for which I had no stomach. Then at 18 I became a clippie (bus conductress) and I loved that. And, of course, my links with Dundee continued as Dundee was on our bus routes and I was a regular visitor to the bus stance in South Lindsay Street. I well remember the inspector strutting about inside the covered stance, marshalling buses with brutal efficiency. We were all terrified of him.
Much later on I started to realise I might possibly have a brain in my head, and I enrolled in the Open University which was a fairly new concept back then. At that time I was a self-employed shopkeeper with my own craft and baby shop, but after gaining my degree I became restless. I wanted more, so decided to train to be a social worker. And where did I go for my training? Why, Dundee University, of course. And a couple of years later I’d obtained my post graduate Diploma in Social Work.
My first social work post was as a medical social worker at Ninewells Hospital, Dundee, following which I transferred into the child care team, and there I remained for a few years before moving to posts in Angus.
I’ve always had a fascination for the written word, and I think I’d been reading books from the time I was 5 and upwards. As a child I also used to make up stories in my head, but never wrote them down. This wasn’t something I thought I could do, stories were magical and I definitely wasn’t magical, so the stories all stayed in my head.
It was many years later, after Carol Pope (the same Carol who came up with the concept of the Dundee Book Prize) started Angus Writers’ Circle, that I began to write seriously. My first story was published in 1991, by DC Thomson in Dundee. Following that I wrote and published many other short stories and articles in a variety of magazines. I’ve also written street theatre – The Forfar Witches, performed on the streets of Forfar. In between all this I was attempting to write novels. The first one, a historical saga, resides in a bottom drawer and, on balance, I think that’s the best place for it. Then followed the crime novels: a historical one that was chosen as one of the twenty winners of the international Crème de la Crime search for new crime writers, although unfortunately publication did not follow; then a contemporary crime novel which won the SAW (Scottish Association of Writers) Pitlochry Award, also unpublished; and finally ‘Dead Wood’ the winner of the Dundee International Book Prize 2009. This last book is now published by Polygon and is available at all good book stores as well as online.
When the Dundee Book Prize was set up in 1999 this seemed to be a fabulous idea and something worth aiming for. Since then the competition has grown to the prestigious event it is today. Needless to say, over the years, my two previous crime novels were entered for the book prize but they sank without trace, which was why it was such a surprise when I found out my third crime novel ‘Dead Wood’ had won the prize this year.
To say that winning the Dundee International Book Prize was the most fabulous thing that has ever happened to me would be an understatement. Getting the award was fantastic as was the trophy but the real rush for me is seeing my book in the bookstores and knowing I can now share my writing with all like-minded readers.
I haven’t gone into the cultural and literary side of Dundee because Andrew Murray Scott, the first Dundee Book Prize winner, has given such an excellent description of the cultural upswing that has happened in Dundee over recent years (see ‘I’m Proud to be a Dundee Author’), and I do not feel qualified to elaborate on anything already written by him. He is an admirable ambassador for Dundee.
I would like to think that I was also an ambassador for the city but my writing concentrates on the dark underbelly of Dundee, the crime and the criminals, so I’m not sure what kind of ambassador that makes me. All I know is that Dundee is part of me even though I don’t live there.
Further information and contact details for Chris Longmuir can be obtained from http://www.chrislongmuir.co.uk
Check out the book:
http://polygon.birlinn.co.uk/book/details/Dead-Wood-9781846971204/
http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/displayProductDetails.do?sku=6619675
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