A SCOTS author has had a series of crime thriller novels set in an independent Scotland published.
Gordon Smart (65) originally self-published his DI Shazia Khan trilogy but had them officially published by Red Dragon Books in August.
Born in Australia, Smart grew up in the south side of Glasgow before going onto study at the University of Aberdeen.
He worked as an English teacher before retiring aged 60 and turning his full attention to fiction writing.
Speaking to The National, he said: “I’d always tried writing as a hobby but then I got the time once I retired and over the last five years or so, I’ve written three of them.
“I wrote the first one between 2016 and 2017. The third one was actually written in lockdown.”
The first book in the series, A Rendezvous with Death, is set in Glasgow and sees the wife of the leader of Glasgow City Council murdered with DI Shazia Khan being made the lead investigator on the case.
Smart added: “I felt it was important to have a diversity in terms of characterisation in Scotland.
“I didn’t just want another white male detective so I thought it was important to have someone from an ethnic background as one of my main characters.”
The author initially tried to find a publisher to little avail when he was writing around 2016 and 2017 but ended up doing it himself.
In turn, his work was only read at first by family, friends and neighbours.
He said he had already read some books set in an alternate world or history, a genre which contains some highly regarded and beloved works.
Often, authors tend to imagine a world in which the Nazis won the Second World War, as Phillip K Dick did in 1962 with The Man in the High Castle.
Alternatively, Malcolm Mackay’s In the Cage Where Your Saviours Hide imagines a world in which Scotland forms an independent kingdom having colonised an area of Central America.
The possibilities are endless, which made the writing process all the more intriguing for Smart.
The author continued: “I wanted the books to be distinctive so setting them in an independent Scotland was important to me.
“I just wondered what would happen if the Yes campaign hadn’t been narrowly defeated in 2014.
“I wanted them to have a political aspect to them but not just be about politics because I wanted to write a thriller novel as well.”
Scottish literature is no stranger to setting novels in the dark underbelly of its biggest cities and Smart’s are no different in that sense.
His books certainly don’t shy away from the hard-hitting elements to which thriller fans will be accustomed.
The second book, The Deadly Shadows, focuses on the murder of an MSP and a drug dealer whilst the author also said human trafficking forms a key plot of the third novel, Death of an Angel.
He continued: “I didn’t want to write about a rosy, brave new world. I wondered what the problems we were facing would be.
“Scottish Labour and the Scottish Conservatives would have to adapt and I thought that would lend itself to some political wheeling and dealing within the book.
“Some elements of the plot are linked to organisations who are against independence and who want to re-unify Scotland with the rest of the United Kingdom.
“I thought you would have independence but there would still be some backlash against that.
“One of the key threads I also write about is the abuse of power we see in a capitalist world. Some of my main characters are journalists trying to take big organisations down.”
Despite having to wait a few years before getting picked up by a publisher, Smart is aware of the relevance his books have now as the Scottish Government continues to fight its case for the right to hold a second independence referendum.
“Although I wrote these a few years ago, it feels like there’s a relevance with everything that’s going on at the minute,” he told The National.
He continued: “I tried not to go too much into the nitty gritty details when it came to writing. That was actually something the editor’s picked up on.
“It was a bit overloaded with those little details at first, I’d focused on currency and things like that.
“I just wanted to make sure I retained the important critical aspect that Scotland was independent.”
Smart confirmed that he’s done with DI Shazia Khan for now but that he was moving onto work on something else.
He said: “I wrote that trilogy but thought it was time to do something else. I’m doing something a bit different now that will take me a little while.”
