Are you a fan of historical fiction? You're in luck: this week on the Ringwood Publishing Podcast, we're joined by Rob McInroy, author of the award-winning Bob Kelty series of crime novels set in the period before WW2! Join us as we chat about why historical fiction resonates, Rob's top tips for writing, and get a sneak peek at the series' next installment, Moot, coming in 2024.
Keen to hear more from Rob? Come along to our event, Writing Historical Fiction - Forgotten Voices, in Typewronger Books at 7:30pm on November 13th.
Haven't yet caught up on the Bob Kelty series? You can buy the first novel, Cuddies Strip, here.
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Are you a fan of historical fiction? You're in luck: this week on the Ringwood Publishing Podcast, we're joined by Rob McInroy, author of the award-winning Bob Kelty series of crime novels set in the period before WW2! Join us as we chat about why historical fiction resonates, Rob's top tips for writing, and get a sneak peek at the series' next installment, Moot, coming in 2024.
Keen to hear more from Rob? Come along to our event, Writing Historical Fiction - Forgotten Voices, in Typewronger Books at 7:30pm on November 13th.
Haven't yet caught up on the Bob Kelty series? You can buy the first novel, Cuddies Strip, here.
Instagram: @ringwoodpublishing
Twitter: @RingwoodPublish
Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/p/Ringwood-Publishing-100063298383591/
Jess: Hi everyone and welcome to the Ringwood Publishing Podcast. I'm your host Jess.
Matilda: And I'm your host Matilda.
Jess: And today we're joined by author Rob McInroy. Rob is the author of the award winning Bob Kelty series of the historical crime fiction genre and it was also long listed for the Crime Writers Association's Dagger Award.
The first two books in the series, Cuddies Strip and Barossa Street, were both published by Ringwood in 2020 and 2022, with the third novel, Moot, coming in 2024. Apart from being a novelist, Rob is also a short story writer and has taught creative writing in the past. He's got an MA in creative writing and a PhD in American literature.
He's also one of the judges in the annual Ringwood short story competition. So, welcome Rob, we're so thrilled to have you on the podcast.
Rob: Pleasure to be here.
Jess: So tell us, how long have you been writing historical fiction?
Rob: Well, not, actually not all that long to be honest. I started writing Cuddies Strip, which, as you said, is the first in the series, in 2018. And it took me probably about a year to write it. And I was lucky enough to win competition with it not long after I'd finished it. And that spurred me on to look for a publisher for it. So I sent it to Ringwood Publishing.
And they were very enthusiastic about it. And so, as you say, it was published in May 2020. And much to my surprise, I became a historical novelist.
Jess: Amazing.
Matilda: That's amazing. So could you tell us a bit about the series and where you got the inspiration for it?
Rob: Well, I kind of fell into the series by, by accident, to be honest. Cuddies Strip, the first novel, is based on true crimes that happened in Perth in 1935. And I just happened across a, a photograph. of a funeral cortege passing through Perth, with hundreds of people lining the streets. And the details on it said it was, uh, for a funeral for a boy called Danny Kerrigan, who'd been murdered on the Cuddies Strip.
That's a kind of a lover's lane on the outskirts of Perth. And I'd never heard this story before, despite having previously worked in the local history library in Perth. So I started doing some research on it, and I came up with this really amazing story. It's quite tragic really, Danny and his girlfriend Marjorie were out on the Cuddies Strip.
One Saturday evening and Danny was shot at close range by a 12 bore shotgun and killed and Marjorie was chased and raped. The police investigation lasted two weeks and they actually solved the case in quite a remarkable way. And I won't say because I wouldn't give any spoilers. But then the case came to trial about six months later. And obviously Marjorie was going to be a prime witness. From reading the newspaper reports from the time, it seemed fairly clear that Marjorie's experience in court was just appalling. And I knew then that I was going to have to write this story. So I went to the National Archives in Edinburgh to see the actual court materials themselves.
And from that, it was really clear that Marjorie's terrible experience was even more stark than was reported in the newspapers, um, because of the way she was treated, um, in the immediate aftermath of the, the, the crimes by the medical and the legal professions. So I kind of, I initially intended it to just be a standalone, to give me a chance to tell Marjorie's story, because that's what I wanted to write about.
And at the time I was already working on a trilogy, which was set in the 1980s in Perth and Crieff. But I realised that with Bob Kelty, I'd created this really quite interesting character. And there was scope for a series. So I started to develop his character and Bob, he's a young man. He's only 20 years old when the story starts and he's working with the Powershire police force as a police constable, but he's absolutely hopeless at it.
He's a terrible policeman. He's got no facility for it whatsoever. I wanted him to be the kind of the antithesis of the usual crime story protagonists, you know, they're massively capable and very well organized. But he is very dogged, and he's got this very strong moral streak and a sense of duty.
So when others are prepared to just give up, he keeps going. And it's him who solves the crime in the end. By the end of Cuddies Strip, he's starting to get disillusioned with the police, and by the time the second book, Barossa Street, starts, he's already handed in his notice. But that doesn't stop him getting embroiled in another terrible crime case.
So the series altogether will all be set in Perth and Perthshire. The first three are set in the 1930s, and the fourth one, which I'm writing at the moment, is set during the war. And I'm now planning a series of... 10 books, which will take Bob up to 1985, at which point that series will merge with the trilogy that I was originally starting to write back in 2018.
So that's where it came from.
Matilda: Wow, amazing!
Jess: Oh, wow. What a full circle.
Rob: Yeah.
Jess: We've just had, like, Allan Nicol on discussing Sheila Garvey and how she was treated by the media at the time of that murder case, so it's interesting that there's definitely, like, scope to discuss this, and it was so prolific that women were treated so horribly in these investigations.
Rob: Yeah, they really, really were, it's absolutely appalling.
Matilda: So you mentioned newspapers a little bit there. Would you be able to tell us a bit about the research you did and did you have any favourite facts that you learned along the way from, from doing your research?
Rob: I do a lot of research because I used to be a librarian and that's my training and you mentioned also that I, I spent five years doing a PhD in American literature.
So research really is my bag. I'm actually much happier researching than, um, than writing, to be honest, and I have to kind of rein myself in, realize when enough's enough. So in the one I'm writing at the moment, Moot, I had to do quite a bit of research on that because there's, there's a bit of espionage in it, and that's something I knew nothing about, and so I've had to research that.
But what really interests me, and What I get interested in the research about is just the daily lives of ordinary people in the 1930s in the approach to war. So I try to get under the skin of what it was like to live then. There's a lot of stuff called mass observation and there's a lot of data through that.
Throughout the war and before the war, the government engaged just ordinary people across the whole country to chronicle what daily life was like. And they've left this amazing archive of material and obviously there's also the newspapers from the time and particularly the local newspapers. What I like to do is weave real events and sometimes real people into the stories.
So I read all of the local newspapers for the days in which my story is set to see what's happening and I try and thread some of it in. In terms of favourite facts. I'm not sure it's a favorite fact, but in the early stages of the war, before the Blitz began, it was a period which is now called the Phony War.
Before the war actually started, people expected an immediate invasion by Germany and an immediate aerial bombing campaign, because that's what happened in Spain with their civil war. A couple of years before in Spain, there were thousands of casualties in places like Guernica, obviously very famously and Barcelona and other cities and towns.
And we kind of expected the same thing to happen here. So even before the declaration of war on the day that Germany invaded Poland, they started the mass evacuation of children from the cities. The hospitals were emptied in order to cope with the thousands of casualties that were expected. There were hundreds of thousands of pets were put down in London and some of the big cities they thought were going to be bombed like Glasgow because they thought they will not be able to look after them.
And then nothing happened for months, just this phony war. But what did happen instead was we saw this huge number of people being killed, hundreds of them, possibly even thousands of them, in traffic accidents that were caused by the blackout. Because the blackout was completely total, even in places like Crieff, you know, tiny little town, no strategic importance, middle of nowhere, almost certainly never going to get bombed, but it had to have a total blackout.
So there was no lighting outside at all. And cars had to put blinkers on the headlights. So the drivers literally couldn't see where they were going. And as a result, they just kept running, running people over. Um, people then were really incredibly stoic. So all of the accidents reported in the paper without any sense of outrage as you would expect nowadays.
They just kind of accepted it. It was just a fact of life. So that's a really interesting sort of facet of life back then, I think.
Matilda: Yeah. That's very fascinating. So what is it that draws you to the 1930s and forties time period over a contemporary setting?
Rob: The interesting thing about the 1930s is that there are really strong resonances with today. The two periods I think are frighteningly similar given what we know happened at the end of the 1930s with, uh, the descent and to war. At that time there was a, there was a lot of global unrest, and Europe in particular was in crisis, which we see the same thing today.
And there was this rise of. Populist authoritarian leaders, people like Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and even in Britain, there was the beginnings of the right wing lurch with Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists. And these authoritarian leaders, they used techniques of manipulation. to try and cement their hold on power.
So they would create the, the other, a set of people who are different from you, and in some way threatening your way of life. So in Nazi Germany, it was Jewish people. In Britain today, it's migrants. And they would deliberately create discord, set one group against another, often on a completely manufactured subject.
So in Nazi Germany, um, there was a lot of stuff about decadence. In Britain today, it's all about wokery and the culture wars. And actually most people don't care about the culture wars, but the right wing press, um, really try and create this, um, atmosphere of false division. And you remember the right wing press back in the 1930s, the Daily Mail had headlines like ARAF are the black shirts.
That's Oswald Mosley's fascists. So there was a lot of support then for right wing stuff. And we're seeing the same thing again today with some of the, the support for the more extreme things that people like Suella Braverman are doing. So for me, immersing myself in the 1930s, , and then looking at the modern world, I actually find it quite frightening.
If you think how close Donald Trump came to staging a coup in America and the way that right wing populists have taken control, people like Viktor Orban in Hungary, in the 1930s exactly the same thing happened in Hungary. They had this massive right wing lurch and flirted with fascism. We're hopefully seeing in the last few months, maybe a bit of a fight back, um, Lula won the election in Brazil against Bolsonaro.
And just a couple of weeks ago, there was a moderate coalition in Poland that managed to oust the, uh, the right wing, the real, severe, severely right wing government. But I think we are still in feeble times and I do worry about it. So for me, I think writing and reading about the 1930s, it just allows us to view our world more critically, and it allows us to understand where we're being used and manipulated and understand the consequences if we allow that to continue.
Jess: Absolutely. There's a lot of concerning parallels with the time periods, I suppose, that I've never really considered, but you can definitely see the sort of descent into increased right wing activity.
Matilda: Yeah, it's nice to think about historical fiction as being not purely something that you read to escape, but something that you can see your contemporary world in as well and perhaps learn from. For sure. So what do you think is the most important thing to keep in mind when writing historical fiction and dealing with things like these?
Rob: I'd say a couple of things. Firstly, I think you need to wear your research lightly. I said I do a lot of research and you have to do a lot of research to make sure that you've got your historical period right and make sure that your characters are behaving appropriately.
But just because you know all of that detail, that doesn't mean to say you have to put it into the book. The story can start to feel... really false if every few paragraphs you're stopping the narrative and stopping the flow to throw in a lot of historical details just to show that you know it all. So I think you need to avoid that and kind of link to that.
Don't try and put modern day sensibilities into the story. This is something that really does irritate me in a lot of books and particularly in TV dramas and films. If you take the role of women in society, for example, and that's obviously a major part of Cuddies Strip.
The period I'm writing about in the 1930s, it was simply not a good time to be a woman. You didn't want to be a woman then. They were second class citizens. They weren't considered equals. Wives were essentially the property of the husbands. A woman schoolteacher who got married would have to resign. And there's simply no getting away from that, however much we would prefer it not to be the case.
But what I see is an awful lot of novels and dramas. Trying to give the female character some agency, some control over her life, because that's what we would want to see in this day and age, and that's what we would have wanted for them. But we just have to be realistic, it didn't happen. In 99 percent of cases, it simply didn't happen.
And you have to be true to the times, however painful that might be. So I think that's one thing I would definitely want to, to, to think about.
Jess: Absolutely, I think that sort of wishful thinking, almost, in writing does take away from the authenticity to some extent.
Matilda: So before writing novels, you started out as a short story writer. And you recently spoke at Ringwood's short story seminar about your experience with short story writing. How did you find the jump from short stories to novels? Was it a relief to not be restricted to a certain word count, or did you find it hard to switch to a bit of a longer format?
Rob: Well, I had a bit of a gap between, 'cause I, I, I did all my short stories and then I stopped and I was doing my PhD and when I was doing that, I didn't have any time for my own writing 'cause I was too busy reading about Cormack McCarthy, who I wrote my thesis on. So I didn't do any creative writing then and then when I came back to it, that's when I decided I'm going to start writing novels, so I had that bit of a gap, but short story writing, I would say, is a very, very good discipline and I do highly recommend it for writers.
It's brilliant training for writers because you've got to be concise and you've got to be clear. You haven't got any time or words to waste. You've got to get into your story, you've got to tell your story, and then get out again. And you've got to build real, incredible characters while you're doing that.
And you don't have an awful lot of words with which to do it. So you really have to put the effort in to make every scene and every scrap of dialogue and every description count. You mentioned the seminar that I did a couple of weeks ago. One of the things I talked about in the seminar was the difference between plotters and pantsers.
So plotters plan everything before they start, and pantsers just make it up as they go along. When I wrote short stories, I was definitely a pantser. I would start writing a story with absolutely no idea what it was going to be about. I would just start writing. And I'd use a set of prompts: phrases or words or sometimes pictures.
And just use those to create a story, and every time I got stuck, I would go back and look at the prompts again. And somehow, something would emerge, and I'd end up with a story I had absolutely no idea I was going to write. And some people I know do kind of write novels like that as well. I think Stephen King is a bit of a pantser.
They might have a basic idea in mind, but no real idea of what's going to happen, or if it's crime fiction, who done it? And you see that with a lot of crime writers. They actually don't know who did it until they start writing it at the end. I can't do that with novels. When it comes to novels, I'm definitely a planner.
Although I haven't said that, the plan does tend to change quite a lot when I'm doing the editing process. But I think, actually, I think I'd struggle now, going back to short stories, because it's something you really do need to keep practicing.
Matilda: So speaking of short stories, you're also one of the judges in the Ringwood short story competition.
Would you be able to tell us what you think makes a good short story, and is there anything in particular that you're hoping to see in the submissions this year? What makes a good short story?
Rob: It's got to be original. You do get an awful lot of stories that mine the same sort of ground. And a lot of it is about, you know, tragic things happening to people.
If you're going to do that, you're going to have to do it in a really original way. You need to have very strong characters. Because for me, character drives everything. So I think character is absolutely essential. You need to have good dialogue. And so what I would say to people who are writing short stories is read it aloud and particularly the dialogue.
Read it aloud. Does it sound like dialogue? One of my pet hates is when you get characters who keep saying each other's names. “Yes, James.” “That's right. Dave.” “No, what do you think?” “Really, James?” It just drives me around the bend because people don't do that. And the other thing I would say is really concentrate on your opening because that is so important as a judge.
I can usually tell from the first 7 or 8. lines, whether a story is going to be in the shortlist or not. It's so important. And when you finish the story, go back and read it. Take out the first two paragraphs and read it again. Does it still make sense? Do you actually need those first two paragraphs? An awful lot of writers, they feel that they need to set a scene, they need to tell you a little bit about what's going on.
Don't. Just kick into the action. There's a phrase, in media res, which is, in the middle of things. That's what you need to do with your stories. If there's a crisis, start at the crisis. Don't start with somebody getting dressed in the morning and thinking, today's going to be a difficult day. Get into the difficult bit, is what I would say.
Matilda: Yeah, that's some great advice.
Jess: That's good advice to just avoid all of the meandering. So you're going to be speaking at our Writing Historical Fiction event on the 13th of November at Typewronger Books in Edinburgh. What can people expect from this event?
Rob: I think it's going to be a really terrific event. We've got, as well as me, we've got three other speakers who are all superb historical novelists. So we've got Flora Johnson. Her novel, What You Call Free, it's set in the time of the Covenanters. And it tells the story of two characters who are, who've been hidden by history. For the reason that I mentioned before, because they're women.
And women's voices are just very seldom heard. And one of the characters in particular is doubly disadvantaged because she happens to be a poor, working class woman. And you just hardly ever hear stories told from that viewpoint. So Flora's novel is just outstanding. And we've got L. A. Christensen.
Linda's writing a series of novels which are set in the early 14th century. So that's a time of war and intrigue between England and Scotland and much of Europe and the Ottoman Empire. So it's a really early and fascinating and highly contentious period of Scottish history. And there's such a breadth to Linda's writing.
She really brings it to life. And we've got Carol Margaret Davison, whose new novel, Bodysnatcher, only came out a couple of months ago. And I actually just finished reading it tonight. It's a retelling of the story of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh. So obviously a very famous story. But again, Carol's presented it from a completely different perspective.
So it's told from the voice of Burke himself, and also from the voice of Nellie, who is his partner, who's a hugely impressive but just astoundingly unfortunate woman. And it's a really brilliant evocation of a terrible period in Scotland's history. So although all four of us are writing about very different periods of Scottish history, I think the one thing that we have in common is the way we use our stories to focus on ideas or people which generally don't feature in fiction.
So we've got untold characters or untold stories. And it's the way that we can make Scottish history real through our fiction and the way we can use historical periods to critically examine. where we are in the current day. The sort of thing I'm doing with the 1930s and the parallels with today. So in the session in Typewronger, we're going to all be doing some readings from our books and then we'll be answering questions on them and on our approach to writing historical fiction.
So as I say, I'm really looking forward to it.
Matilda: Sounds like an amazing evening.
Jess: I think it'll be a good one.
Matilda: For sure. So your next novel in the series, Moot, is due to be released in 2024. Uh, would you be able to give us a sneak preview of what it's about?
Rob: Right, so Moot… in July 1939, so we're talking about six weeks before the start of the Second World War.
We saw the third international rover scout moot. A moot is just a scout camp. Um, the third, um, moot was held in the grounds of Manee Castle, which is just outside Crieff, my hometown. And this actually did happen. So it's just a few weeks before the declaration of war, and 3,500 young men aged 18 to 24 gathered for this scout camp, which was promoting international harmony and goodwill in the days before the war started.
And they came from all over the world, so from Rhodesia and Eira, as they were called then, from Sweden, Denmark, uh, Yugoslavia, Turkey, India, all over the place. And they were there for 10 days. There would have been more people than 3, 500 there. They were originally planning for 5,000. But just a few months before the moot, the British government introduced conscription for 21 year olds.
The first, uh, and I think at the moment only, peacetime conscription in British history. And so a lot of the people who would have been at the moot, by a strange irony, they had to start their national service on the opening day of the moot camp. But that's, that's my setting. I was obviously drawn to this because it's like the last gasp of decency in society before the world fell into six years of hell in the Second World War, and I just think that makes it a really great setting.
You've got this kind of polarity between good and evil. And obviously I've made sure that this last gasp of goodness and decency is tainted. So, there is a murderer in their midst, and possibly two murderers. So, in the opening scene, we see two men walking on a path on the edge of the moot camp, and one kills the other.
But the crime is witnessed by a third man who's watching from behind the trees. And this person seems to be probably more annoyed than shocked by what he sees. And so there, from there, the mystery, the mystery begins, and that's what Moot is going to start exploring.
Jess: Intriguing. It'll be on my reading list for sure.
Matilda: Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Ringwood Publishing Podcast and thank you so much to Rob for coming on the podcast this week. If you want to hear more from Rob, you should definitely come along to the Writing Historical Fiction event in Typwronger Books in Edinburgh on the 13th of November at 7:30pm. Rob's two novels, Cuddies Strip, and Barossa Street, are available to buy from the Ringwood website as paperbacks or as eBooks, along with the rest of our catalog. And of course, stay tuned for the release of Moot next year. Don't forget to follow us on social media. We're Ringwood publishing on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
We're also launching a social media page just for the podcast. So keep your eyes out for that. If you're not big on social media, we've got you covered with a monthly newsletter, which you can subscribe to on the website. Also, if you're listening to this as it's released, you've got just under a month to get your subscription, submissions in for the Ringwood short story competition.
So if you haven't already, better start writing. Thanks everyone and see you next week!