S.G. MacLean's Books | Crime Books

Biography

Born in Inverness in 1966, Shona MacLean is one of five children. She grew up in a series of hotels that her parents ran across the Scottish Highlands. She went on to study at the University of Aberdeen, where she received a PhD in 16th and 17th Century Scottish History.

“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in history. Any old, tumbledown wall, evocative name will get me wondering about what that place used to be like, who used to live there.” (Book Lover Worm)

Becoming a Writer

After university, she married a secondary school teacher and moved to Bamff in Northern Scotland. It was here that she began to write.

“My uncle was the thriller writer Alistair MacLean, so it always seemed a perfectly possible thing to do. It was really only when I’d reached the stage of progressing my academic career after I finished my PhD, but finding myself living too far from the nearest university to commute and with young children to look after, that I turned to writing to occupy my mind and interest.” (Book Lover Worm)

Her first book — The Redemption of Alexander Seaton — is set in 17th Century Banff. It tells the story of a disgraced would-be minister of the Church of Scotland who investigates the murder of an apothecary’s apprentice.

“As for becoming a crime writer, that was by default. I have always loved crime fiction, from The Famous Five via Agatha Christie, Ellis Peters and Arthur Conan Doyle to Henning Mankell and Reginald Hill, but I had not planned that my first book should be a crime novel. It was intended more as a study of a young man’s life. I needed some seminal event that would change his life in some way, and I decided to put in a murder … hence I have been a crime writer ever since.” (Promoting Crime)

Moving the Action to London

It was hard to convince a publisher to take on a historical thriller set in the far North of Scotland. MacLean persevered, writing four novels in the series. However, her publishers — always with an eye on sales — were keen that she took the action to London. MacLean struggled to move her protagonist and thought that she and her publishers had come to the end of the road. Fortunately, a T.V. documentary provided her with a source of fresh inspiration.

The Interregnum

“B.B.C. 4 aired London, a Tale of Two Cities, a documentary on the seventeenth-century city presented by Dan Cruickshank. Cruickshank’s enthusiasm was engaging, and when he came to the phenomenon of the London coffee house in the 1650s, I was hooked. In these new, amazingly egalitarian institutions, men from all walks of life met, attracted not only by the addictive brew but the opportunity to talk. Here, fuelled by the rise of a print culture catering for and stoking an astonishing hunger for current affairs, they could endlessly discuss all the issues of the day.” (Irish Times)

The coffee houses of the interregnum, with their politics, plots, spies and intrigue, were the perfect setting for historical fiction. MacLean’s second series, which started with The Seeker, was born.

A Change of Name

In a second revenue-building ploy, MacLean’s publishers asked her to change her pen name from Shona to S.G. MacLean.

“The thinking was that my name was too soft and feminine and men wouldn’t buy my books… This kind of thing has happened to other thriller writers, like C.J. Sansom, S.J. Parris and V.C. Letemendia.” (Scotsman)

This tactic didn’t do Joanne Rowling any harm, so MacLean agreed. Successful as it was, it casts an unforgiving shadow over Britain’s crime reading, south-east centric, male population.

Critical Reception

S.G. Maclean’s Books have met critical acclaim. The C.W.A. short-listed The Redemption of Alexander Seaton for their Historical Dagger. The first and third books in the Damien Seeker series — The Seeker and Destroying Angel — both won it. Success was partly due to MacLean’s strong belief in the accuracy of her stories.

“I actually feel very strongly that there’s a moral obligation not to deliberately misrepresent or tarnish people’s reputation simply for the sake of your story, if there is nothing in the sources to suggest that this might have been the case. Readers will often take what they’ve read in a piece of historical fiction as ‘history’. I feel there’s an astonishing arrogance in a writer of fiction looking at someone who was an actual, living human being and saying ‘I am an artist, and therefore your life and reputation are there for me to do with as I wish.”

MacLean’s switch from writing about Alexander Seaton on her home turf to Damien Seeker, a Yorkshireman living in London, and her need for veracity was less than straightforward.

“[I] didn’t know a great deal about the English civil war as a purely English concept, nor indeed about Oliver Cromwell. The English civil war was only one aspect of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and at Aberdeen in the late 1990s, we took a self-consciously non Anglo-centric approach. In short, buzzing though I was with the idea for my story, I had a great deal of reading to do.” (Irish Times)

Her writing is atmospheric and full of fragments of historical information. Whilst interesting, where MacLean’s writing wins out is her characters. Her study of history is a study of people, their desires, ambitions and motivations. So their actions are all too plausible.

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