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Sidebar: Edinburgh: A City of Stories

It is impossible to be an author in Edinburgh without being conscious of the many previous generations of writers for whom the city has provided sustenance and inspiration. The visitor who arrives in Edinburgh by train emerges from Waverley Station (named after Sir Walter Scott’s first novel) onto Princes Street and cannot fail to notice the jagged, towering presence of the Scott Monument (at some 60 metres [200 feet] in height, it is the tallest structure in the world built to celebrate a writer’s life and legacy). Other statues and memorials are dotted around the city, commemorating Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Fergusson, and the world’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. There are pubs with names such as the Jekyll and Hyde and the Conan Doyle. Walking downhill from Edinburgh Castle—down what is known as the Royal Mile—the pedestrian passes, in quick succession, the Writers’ Museum (dedicated to Scott, Stevenson, and Robert Burns), the city’s two main libraries, the offices of Canongate Books (Scotland’s most successful and enterprising independent book publisher), the Scottish Storytelling Centre, the Scottish Book Trust, and the Scottish Poetry Library. At the end of this walk sits a recent structure, home to the Scottish Parliament, on whose exterior walls are carved quotes from Scottish authors of the past. Literature, it seems, is not just part of the city’s heritage but has seeped into the very structure of the place.

Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, was born in Edinburgh. So too was Muriel Spark, who wrote so vividly of the city in her masterpiece The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, attended university in Edinburgh (as, for a time, did Charles Darwin and Thomas Carlyle). The adventure novel The Coral Island, still in print a century and a half after publication, was written by R.M. Ballantyne, who was born and educated in Edinburgh. The philosopher David Hume is another whose statue can be found on the Royal Mile. Hume was active at a time when Edinburgh was known as a “hotbed of genius,” with thinkers and visionaries from Adam Smith to Benjamin Franklin nourished by conversation in the city’s clubs and taverns. Moreover, the Encyclopædia Britannica was first published in Edinburgh, while The Chambers Dictionary still makes Edinburgh its home.

The above—by no means an exhaustive list—may go some way toward explaining why Edinburgh was chosen in 2004 by UNESCO to be the world’s first City of Literature. But Edinburgh offers something more: a lively contemporary writing and publishing scene. The area of the city where I make my home is known locally as “writers’ block,” in the main because J.K. Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith, and I live within a few hundred yards of each other. Nor do we keep ourselves to ourselves: local café owners know that Ms. Rowling still writes at various tables with a mug of coffee beside her; Professor McCall Smith and myself have been known to share a few drams of malt of an evening, while discussing everything and anything. Irvine Welsh (of Trainspotting fame) also keeps a home in the city, and novelist Kate Atkinson, who won a Whitbread Book Award for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, is another Edinburgh resident. Meantime, the annual Edinburgh International Book Festival is the largest in Europe, bringing authors of worldwide repute such as Harold Pinter, Gore Vidal, and Seamus Heaney to the city to meet, converse, and share tales and anecdotes—very like the get-togethers of old where Scott or Burns might be liable to drop in. Edinburgh remains very much a city of stories.

But why?

One answer may lie in its very design. The original city (stretching in a steep and narrow line from Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse) was, in the 18th century, at danger from overcrowding. Sanitation was a problem, as were the precarious tenements which housed the majority of the population and which had a tendency to fall down. The answer was to build the “New Town” to the north of the Nor Loch (itself now drained and forming Princes Street Gardens). This geographical dividing of the city—into the rational and planned (the New Town, where the wealthy made their homes) and the mazy, dark, and nefarious Old Town—gave rise to literary metaphors for the human condition and provided Stevenson with his major inspiration for Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In turn, Stevenson’s story continues to be an inspiration to contemporary authors. My own first crime novel, Knots and Crosses, was (in part) an attempt to update the themes of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a project which continued with my second Inspector Rebus outing, Hide and Seek. Likewise, another classic Edinburgh story of the 19th century, James Hogg’s sinister and mesmerizing The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, provided the impetus for my novel The Black Book.

I arrived in Edinburgh in 1978, aged 18, from a small coal-mining town to the north. Within a few weeks, I knew which howffs (bars) the poets and thinkers frequented—much the same ones Hugh MacDiarmid and his circle had been comfortable in a generation before. I remember buying a couple of drinks for Norman MacCaig at Bennet’s Bar on Leven Street while picking his brains on how to get my own callow poetry published. Yet, while bumping into (and supping with) poets and playwrights was fun, still there seemed something stifling about this weight of tradition. No one, it was assumed, was going to write a contemporary equivalent of MacDiarmid’s masterpiece, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, while Muriel Spark was reckoned to have produced the perfect Edinburgh novel in her internationally acclaimed The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Ironically, it took two Glasgow writers to shake things up. Alasdair Gray’s astonishing Lanark (1981) was followed three years later by James Kelman’s first novel, The Busconductor Hines. Both were published in Edinburgh, and both showed that the contemporary Scottish novel could be challenging, inventive, vibrant, visceral, and relevant. Alongside this rise in activity, the punk ethos had infiltrated publishing: small (often short-lived) magazines sprang up, public readings were organized, and writing groups prospered. My own first publisher—Kelman’s, too—was a student-run cooperative venture called Polygon (these days known for its work with Alexander McCall Smith). At around the same time, a University of Edinburgh student called Jamie Byng took over the running of the Canongate publishing house and began to revolutionize its list. (The result would be a Booker Prize winner and a still-growing reputation for risk taking and innovation.) Edinburgh no longer seemed in thrall to its literary past. Suddenly, it was possible to write about the contemporary scene in a contemporary idiom, with publishers and a ready audience waiting.

What followed was Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, published in 1993. It took as its subject matter the drug-taking scene of that time and was written in a street demotic which gave the novel added grit and a sense that these were real, contemporary lives. “Douce” Edinburgh, the city of Miss Jean Brodie and her “girls,” would never be the same. However, something about the city balked at easy compartmentalization. Instead of Trainspotting clones, Edinburgh threw up a bewildering variety of writers working in very different styles and with different intentions. The “Edinburgh novel” proved an elusive beast. Alexander McCall Smith lives in the city, but he has been made famous by his gentle detective stories set in Botswana. Similarly, the Harry Potter books are written in Edinburgh without this fact being discernible to any great degree in their pages, while Kate Atkinson doesn’t feel the need to set all her books in the city she’s made her home.

All of which seems quite proper. Sherlock Holmes…Peter Pan…Treasure Island…The Wind in the Willows. These were Edinburgh creations only tangentially. Stevenson may have had the notorious Edinburgh scoundrel Deacon Brodie (gentleman by day, hoodlum by night) in mind when he wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, yet he chose to set that book in London. One theory for the shift in geography is that the first draft of the story said too much about its author’s own darker proclivities. (That draft, now lost, is thought to have been tossed onto the fire after Stevenson’s wife, Fanny, objected to it.) By not setting the story in his native city, the author could hide more comfortably behind it.

My own first novel was set in my hometown and got me into trouble with one-time neighbours who didn’t agree with my interpretation of the place. So in 1985 I sat down in my student apartment to begin a novel which would be playful and gothic, harking back to Hogg and Stevenson, updating the divided-self theme of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and bringing that tale back to Edinburgh. When I scribbled my first notes on the project, I recorded that “the hero may be a cop.” He turned out to be called John Rebus (a rebus being a pictorial puzzle). And when no one realized, post-publication, that Knots and Crosses owed a larger debt to Stevenson than to Agatha Christie or Raymond Chandler (neither of whom I’d read), I decided to try again with another Rebus adventure, this time titled Hide and Seek and featuring a club called Hyde’s where rich businessmen could fulfill their baser fantasies.

Twenty years on, I’m still writing books set in Edinburgh, principally because I am still curious about the place and still finding out its secrets, wishing to share the knowledge with readers. My book The Falls came out of a conversation with a museum curator who told me the story of one of his exhibits—a series of well-made, carved wooden coffins only a few inches in height and containing little wooden dolls. Seventeen of these had been found in a cave by some Edinburgh schoolchildren in 1836, and their meaning and provenance remained a mystery. I decided I had to give this open-ended story some closure, even if only in fictional form. The biggest thrill after publication was being informed that visitors to the museum were now asking to be shown the tiny coffins featured in my story. Likewise, when I discovered that an act of cannibalism had once taken place on the site of today’s Scottish Parliament building, I could feel a story begging to be told. The result was a novel called Set in Darkness, in which excavations at that site uncover a corpse.

The arrival of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 has been one further important factor in the quality and quantity of Scottish writers. There is a new confidence about this small, relatively isolated country. People are beginning to ask big questions about identity and nationhood, about our current situation and possible future. Book-length histories of Scotland appear on a regular basis, evidence both of a ready, questioning audience and of a desire on the part of historians and thinkers to interpret the past so as to provide route maps for the journey to come.

This journey has brought Edinburgh into the 21st century. Like the rest of Scotland, it has had little need to enforce the smoking ban implemented in 2006: the city’s drinkers fell into line with little fuss or dissent, even when it was noticed that such a ban would have an effect on cultural life (so that an actor playing Winston Churchill onstage would no longer be able to puff on a cigar). New buildings have gone up—not just the Parliament building, but a state-of-the-art dance studio and the Scottish Storytelling Centre. The world changes, and these changes are taken on board by the city’s creative artists, and yet…

For many of us, the beauty of Edinburgh is that it is possible to be invisible here. The annual arts festival takes over the city each August, and with it comes a temporary doubling of the population. Edinburgh contains these multitudes and still retains its tranquil spots, areas such as the extinct volcano called Arthur’s Seat, where isolation is possible. The city has always thrived on invisible industries such as banking and insurance, industries which make a difference without any huge physical manifestation—you can’t see monetary transactions or policy documents in the same way you notice ships or cars being rolled out. The people who make Edinburgh their home seem to like this. Centuries back, they would hide from invading armies in the warren of tunnels beneath the castle and the Royal Mile, and in a sense they are still hiding. When August ends and the festivalgoers depart, Edinburgh comes up for air.

All of which suits the writer, since writing, too, is largely an invisible act. The reader sees only the finished product, not the work behind it. Sometimes, only glimpses of the author can be had—on book jackets or during the occasional promotional tour. As I walk through the streets of my adopted home, I can feel that Edinburgh is holding something back from me. After more than 15 Rebus novels, there are still so many things I don’t know about the place, so many secrets and mysteries lying just behind its fabric, stories waiting to be told.

With Edinburgh’s designation as a UNESCO City of Literature, new avenues seem to be opening up for the city’s writers. A monthly “salon” has enabled writers, publishers, and arts administrators to gather and exchange ideas and gossip. Meantime, the walls between our various artistic compartments are breaking down. Writers are engaging in projects with musicians, painters, and sculptors. For me, this is an exciting and significant development. Authors can, of course, remain invisible if they wish—Edinburgh allows them that privilege—but they can also participate in new cross-cultural ventures. The city’s publishers and writing groups are as vibrant as ever. Small magazines still come and go (often, these days, to be found online rather than in actual printed form). Journalists from across the globe arrive in Edinburgh (many decanting at Waverley Station) to ask why this small city—a city the size of a town that sometimes feels like a village—is punching so far above its weight in literary terms.