Crime fiction set in WYOMING and MONTANA
Behind the Scenes at Bloody Scotland with Craig Robertson
13th September 2022
Behind the Scenes at Bloody Scotland with Craig Robertson.
It used to be said that a never-ending job was like painting the Forth Bridge. The idea being that as soon as you got to the end, you had to start again. However, this all changed in December 2011 when, thanks to some fancy new triple-layer paint, the bridge never had to be done again.
Is it a coincidence then that Bloody Scotland started in 2012? I don’t bloody think so.
For those of us who organise Scotland’s international crime writing festival, it’s a year-round task. There’s more bloodshed and fewer trains but the never-ending nature of it is the same. No sooner does a Stephen King end than a David Baldacci has to start.
Bloody Scotland, held each September in the beautiful, historic city of Stirling, has grown enormously since that first little festival ten years ago. From just 38 authors appearing in just two venues, the 2022 iteration has 122 authors in seven venues being beamed to 28 countries worldwide.
Over those ten years, we’ve made use of many of Stirling’s finest buildings – three hotels, two churches, one (former) hospital, the old town jail, a royal park, a traditional pub, a museum, the sheriff court, the university, a theatre/courthouse/prison, local schools, the streets, and Stirling Castle.
Our team consists of just 11 people. In the spirt of the classified football results, I feel I should spell that out in full. ELEVEN. There are four authors (Lin Anderson, Gordon Brown, Abir Mukherjee, and me, Craig Robertson) plus seven other people you don’t need to know. I’m kidding! Also onboard are festival director Bob McDevitt, our chair Jamie Crawford, treasurer Muriel Binnie, governance expert Catriona Reynolds, our press and marketing gurus Fiona Brownlee and Tim Donald, and social media manager Dawn Burnett.
Photo: Scotsman.com
Our collaborative process involves many meetings, lots of bright ideas, and countless robust arguments (many, perhaps all, of the latter are started by me). Somehow, and no one’s ever quite sure how, we pull off the annual miracle and the festival takes place. Even more mystifyingly, I think we manage to make each one better than the year before.
Not that there haven’t been hiccups. Lots of them.
There are always last-minute hitches before the programme is announced each June. An author pulls out and there’s a frantic 11th hour effort to save the day and find a suitable replacement. I remember an American writer falling ill and being unable to travel, but this was after the programme had been sent to the printer. We stopped the presses, had hurried discussions, managed to contact and persuade a little-known, soon-to-be debut author named Richard Osman to fill the breach, wrote up new copy, found photographs, sent countless emails, got copyright permissions, proofed it all and finally hit send. I was in Los Angeles at the time and finished doing all of this at 8 in the morning from a midnight start.
The trick is to make it all look as efficient as possible no matter how much chaos there is behind the scenes. To mangle another metaphor, we’re like a swan gliding regally while beneath the surface our legs are paddling furiously and being savaged by a school of hungry piranhas.
There have been many bites at our legs. Authors in the wrong place; authors in the wrong time zone; missing goalposts for the football match; burning the grass on the historic 300-year-old bowling green (yes Gordon Brown, I’m looking at you); forgetting buzzers, kazoos, and slides for the quiz (all me); the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers playing on defiantly while council officers were trying to drag them off stage; Denise Mina’s babysitter being late; rail strikes; authors falling ill; trains breaking down; a mini power cut; a global pandemic; authors going missing; breaking fire safety limits at the Curly Coo; readers needing oxygen on Stirling’s infamous cobblestone hills; and on and on.
There have doubtless been many more that I’ve been unaware of simply because someone dealt with them with the quiet efficiency that you’d expect from people who routinely dispose of bodies in a surreptitious fashion. The entire ten years has been a triumph of creativity over bureaucracy, of sheer bloody-mindedness over adversity, of luck over good judgement, of fun over fretting, of write over wrong.
So yes, a never-ending project can now be known as being like organising a Bloody Scotland festival. But every moment of it has been worthwhile. Seeing readers and authors come to Stirling and leave with a bag full of books, a smile on their face, and a head full of good memories makes up for every bit of snagging along the way. Here’s to another ten!
Craig Robertson
Head over to Bloody Scotland and bag yourself some tickets for this year: 15-18 September 2022 and make sure you follow them on Twitter @BloodyScotland Insta @BloodyScotland and of course follow Craig Robertson for writing such a great piece for us! Twitter @CraigRobertson_ Instagram @craigr62
Join Team TripFiction on Social Media:
Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction)
Please wait...
