Stuart MacBride is one of the great exponents of Scottish crime fiction, aka Tartan Noir, with a couple of awards and plenty of shortlists to his name. In his latest book And the Corpse Wore Tartan, MacBride brings to the center one of his most beloved and annoying creations – Detective Sergeant Roberta Steel – and drops her into an Agatha Chistie-style murder mystery, although one with plenty of sly winking to the readers.
And the Corpse Wore Tartan declares its intentions from the first page: Roberta Steel is found spectacularly hungover in a field outside a stately castle hotel in the Scottish Highlands. It turns out that she came to surprise her wife who was attending the wedding of a work colleague and managed to spectacularly disgrace herself at the reception. Things go from bad to worse when the father of the bride is discovered half naked and impaled on a stag’s head in the hotel foyer and the hotel is cut off from the rest of the world by a storm. Fortunately, the father of the groom is a policeman and, together with his offsider, is dragooned by Steel into investigating.
The fun of this book comes from MacBride’s own enjoyment in putting the foul-mouthed, hard drinking, always hungry, judgmental Roberta Steel in the middle of an upper-class manor house mystery full of secrets and suspects. Being Scotland, the incessant rain (which Roberta often finds herself out in) feels like a character in and of itself. And then there are the nods to the grand traditions of the golden age of crime (Murder on the Orient Express even gets name checked at one point) which Roberta acknowledges and then blithely ploughs through.
DS Roberta Steel may well put some readers off. But she is certainly unique and possibly an acquired taste (her long-suffering wife Susan obviously thinks so). And she is the chaotic driving force behind this slyly enjoyable Scottish crime novel.
And the Corpse Wore Tartan by Stuart MacBride
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