DI Buchan Book 7 Out Today!
Added at 15:37 on 28 November 2024
Civilisation seems to be coming along swimmingly at the moment, and to add to this glorious epoch in the history of humankind, today sees the release of book seven in the DI Buchan series.
“If there’s one thing we need more than anything else,” said Professor Malcolm Connery, as he stood this morning on the sunlit steps of the Glasgow Institute of Special Things, “it’s another crime novel set in Scotland. When was the last time anyone did one of those?”
Following the conclusion of the Jan Baltazar saga, the trilogy-within-the-series, DI Buchan returns in I WANTED TO MURDER FOR MY OWN SATISFACTION. This time the boffins at Long Midnight Publishing HQ here in Gstaad decided to go for more of a serial killer scenario, another sadly-neglected trope of crime fiction. 👀
Long-suffering fans of the inside of my head may recall I used the line ‘I wanted to murder for my own satisfaction’ – taken from Russian classic Crime and Punishment – once before, in a decapitation scene in the sixth Barney Thomson novel, THE HAUNTING OF BARNEY THOMSON, featuring a killer wearing a Dostoyevsky mask.
Let’s take a trip back in time to my “naïve early period,” and have a read of that scene.
'Who the fuck are you?' demanded Nelly, clutching her paintbrush, but not rising from her chair. 'Are you from the government? Here about the mince pies?'
'Nelly,' said the guy. Holes for the eyes and mouth. He was clutching an axe, the same brute of a weapon which had done for the still undiscovered Ward Bracken the previous evening.
'Big fucking brains on you,' said Nelly. 'Bugger off.'
The guy moved forward. Still, strangely, there seemed nothing particularly menacing about him. Despite the axe.
'What's with the mask?' said Nelly. 'You look like a drooling old gipper, all incontinence pants and falling asleep in your soup.'
'You'd know about that,' he said.
Nelly was getting mad, not scared. She stood up and raised the paint brush above her head. Lips curled in a snarl. The old man hesitated before the kill.
'Are you going to say what this is about before you kill me, or are you too pusillanimous even for that, you stupid prick?'
Took aim at his right eye.
'I wanted to murder for my own satisfaction,' said the old man, and she could sense the smile and the sweat behind the plastic.
'Oh, for God's sake,' muttered Nelly, 'here we go, quoting Russian literature pish. Well, you can go and stick your Dos—'
The axe fell swiftly, moving through the air with the romantic swoosh of a cricket bat swinging through the line of the ball and hitting a beautiful boundary back over the bowler's head.
Nelly's head spun into the air, blood spraying in a mathematically precise parabola around the room, bounced off the painting and fell with a thump onto the floor. Eyes open, still angry. Her body stayed inert in the seat for a second, then the arm fell to the side and the movement toppled the body over and it fell heavily onto the floor beside the head.
He stood over her body. Making sure she was dead. You never knew with Nelly.
And now the line is back, though in a slightly less comedic manner, in DI Buchan 7. To be honest, I still haven’t actually read Crime and Punishment, so don’t be expecting parallels. Here’s the blurb.
THE HORROR HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN…
“I awoke one morning to unexpected omnipotence, though I did not know what to do with it.”
A note arrives one chill October morning for DI Buchan, the writer taking credit for a series of deaths around the country, none of which have been recorded as murder. It seems spurious, a macabre joke, yet there’s something about it that makes Buchan’s blood run cold.
A week later it begins. A corpse in a park, a body horribly mutilated. And soon a note arrives for Buchan’s attention: “I confess, I did this without reason. I wanted to murder for my own satisfaction…”
An indiscriminate killer. Crime without motive. Potential victims beyond counting. Murder without end. The seventh book in the series takes DI Buchan and the team in a new direction, as a terrifying, brutal serial killer haunts the streets of the old city…