About the DI Marjory Fleming series.

A woman appeared suddenly in my mind.  She was tall, with an athletic build, not pretty but with clear hazel eyes and the sort of face it is pleasant to look at, and an attractive voice. When I first pictured her, she was struggling to get her kids out to school in the morning, before going off to her demanding job as a detective inspector. 

So Marjory Fleming came into being.  I knew she was tough and humorous, with a passion for justice.  She had a loving family, but all the anxieties that go along with that, as well as the insecurities every woman feels when working in what is still a man's world, even though she is more than able to give as good as she gets.  She was the sort of woman I'd like to have as a friend.

It happened, just at that time, that I had occasion to go to an event in Scotland's Book Town – Wigtown, in Galloway.  It was at the height of the foot-and-mouth epidemic; farmers were in utter despair and businesses dependent on tourism were going bankrupt.  Even with the car windows shut, there was the sickening, oily stench of funeral pyres, and  the landscape was dead – no cows in the fields, no white dots of sheep grazing on the hills.

Thinking about the tragedy that was leaching the life from the rural community, I found myself thinking how dreadful it must be, in a place like this, to be in the police force, when the law it was your duty to enforce meant compelling farmers you might have known all your life to allow in the killing squads which would wipe out generations of livestock breeding.   Then I thought how much worse it would be if you were also a farmer's wife – so, with the terrible sadism authors show to the characters they love, I decided that was what Marjory Fleming must be.

I also somehow had a clear picture of the man who is her DS, Tam MacNee.  I knew exactly what he looked like – short, with an acne-pitted face and a gap-tooth smile, always dressed in a white t-shirt, jeans, trainers and a black leather jacket – but I didn't realise where he came from.  Then suddenly, quite recently, I remembered that a very long time ago we had had problems with theft and I got a fright when I came downstairs to find, standing in my hall, a small man in jeans and a black leather jacket, smoking a cigarette.  When I challenged him, he produced a warrant card – so he lives on in Tam MacNee.

As the series starts with Cold in the Earth, Marjory, who has always lived in the area, whose friends are all in the farming community, finds herself for the first time an outsider, with even her loving marriage to Bill threatened.   And as the series goes on, the effects can still be felt – because in real communities, the terrible consequences of disaster do not vanish when the media loses interest.

I try, too, to highlight the very real problems in the countryside, which isn't as romantically idyllic as it appears in the lifestyle magazines.  In The Darkness and the Deep the background is a fishing village suffering from the destruction of the fishing industry.  Lying Dead is set in a picturesque hamlet where local families have been driven out by the high prices paid for second homes.  In Lamb to the Slaughter, the whole character of a town is threatened by a plan to build a superstore. The local effects of an influx of Eastern European workers is a theme in Dead in the Water.

The books describe  a world where people may be cruel or weak or foolish, where bad things happen to good people, certainly, and sometimes to people who aren't very good at all, but it is a world where most are kind and decent and honest, good neighbours and friends.

Her father, Angus Laird, was a policeman too, and in choosing her career, Marjory was influenced by a desire to prove to him that she's every bit as good as the son he would have preferred – not that she ever manages.  Indeed, her promotion to a rank he never achieved has made their spiky relationship even more difficult.  Her mother, Janet, warm-hearted and lovable, keeps the peace between them and makes up for her daughter's culinary inadequacy by keeping her family supplied with home-baking via The Tin, a trusty receptacle which goes out to Mains of Craigie full and comes back empty.

Her children are Catriona – Cat  and Cameron – Cammie. Cammie has nothing on his mind except rugby while Cat goes through a typical teenager's ups and downs.

Her sergeant, Tam MacNee, is a wee Glasgow hard man and the works of Robert Burns are his bible.  His wife is Bunty, a lady generous in spirit as in girth, with a love of animals prompted by her inability to have children.  Tam adores her since without her he might have found himself still living in Glasgow and drawn to the wrong side of the law, but being a poacher turned gamekeeper makes him a very effective officer.  He and Marjory worked as partners before she got promotion, but he has never had any desire to rise to a rank which is more desk than leg work.

The towns mentioned in the series do not exist, though their location is carefully described.  Kirkluce, a market town where the Galloway Constabulary has its headquarters, is placed on the main road, half-way between Newton Stewart and Stranraer.  Knockhaven, the fishing village in The Darkness and the Deep, lies between the two villages of Port William and Monteith on Luce Bay.  Drumbreck, the setting for  Lying Dead, is on an inlet off Wigtown Bay.  When the police officers move about the area, their routes are described using real place names and often road numbers.

Kirkluce is a very typical Scottish market town, couthy and confident, still not invaded by the superstores and the high street chains, with a wide high street with individual shops, pubs like the Cutty Sark - where Tam MacNee is a regular - and takeaways, a couple of small restaurants and a café as well as an old-fashioned hotel and a craft centre.  People stop in the street to talk to friends as they 'do the messages' (get in the shopping) and rumours travel quicker than the tide on the Solway, which comes in faster than a horse can gallop.

Mains of Craigie, where the Flemings live, is  mainly a sheep farm which during the foot-and-mouth epidemic, the setting for Cold in the Earth,  suffered  dreadfully.   The farmhouse is slate-roofed old grey stone with the simple style of a child's drawing – three windows up, two down with in the middle a door which is seldom used since everyone comes in through the mud room and the farmhouse kitchen.  It is set amid soft rolling hills and below lies the old orchard, long past producing good apples but providing a  home for Marjory's precious flock of chookie-hens.