HAPPY childhood memories of trips “doon the watter” to Rothesay inspired best-selling Scottish crime writer Craig Robertson’s latest thriller.

Set in Glasgow and on Bute, The Undiscovered Deaths Of Grace McGill takes the reader back in time to the 1960s as the main character delves into the past to unravel an unsolved mystery.

“When I was a child in the late Sixties, we used to go to Bute most summers because my gran’s sister had a flat in Rothesay, and I absolutely loved it,” said Robertson.

“We would take the train to Wemyss Bay, where I always crossed my fingers that the Waverley would turn up rather than the regular ferry to take us across to Rothesay.

“It was an adventure to go over to an island in a paddle steamer among all the crowds of holidaymakers from Glasgow, eating ice-cream and fish and chips by the sea.”

This is his 10th novel and the first to be set on the island. “Most of my novels are set in Glasgow, where I lived and worked as a journalist for a Sunday paper for 20 years before becoming a full-time writer in 2010, when I got my second two-book deal,” said Robertson, who now lives in Stirling.

“I don’t like the term ‘tartan noir’ as it’s twee, but Scotland does punch above its weight with crime writing. We have a great storytelling tradition and Glasgow lends itself as a setting for thrillers. It’s aggressive and in your face, gallus and friendly, and there’s a real sense of community, while it’s also a city of contrasts – you could be in a wealthy area and walk two streets into a deprived area. I once ‘ killed’ someone in a street near where I live in Stirling and regretted it – it was far too close to home.”

The writer had not been back on Bute since those childhood holidays, but when he took part in an author event in 2015, he was persuaded to run a crime writing festival, Bute Noir, which started the following year.

“It seemed kind of natural to set my new book there. I wanted to give something back to the island. We’ve had appearances from Ian Rankin, Stuart MacBride, Ann Cleeves, Mark Billingham, and brought people over from Mexico, Scandinavian countries and the US,” added Robertson, who is also on the board of international crime writing festival Bloody Scotland.

“The crime writers from abroad are always amazed by the railway station and ferry crossing when they get to Wemyss Bay, while Rothesay has hardly changed since I was a child. My five-year-old self would recognise it, and when I went back I was able to find my way around. It’s odd to go back and run a book festival there – my younger self would be surprised.”

His latest novel is narrated by the socially awkward but empathetic Grace McGill, whose job is to clean homes after people die alone and undiscovered, whether it’s clutter, bodily remains or dark secrets.

One job takes her to the Partick flat of an old man who has lain undetected for months. It seems an unremarkable life and unnoticed death, but something about it gets under Grace’s skin, leading her on an investigation into the disappearance of a 17-year-old girl on Bute who vanished among the holidaymakers in the 1960s.

Robertson got the idea for Grace’s unusual job from an article he read about Japan, where lonely deaths, in which the elderly who are isolated from family and friends die alone and aren’t discovered for a long time, is known as kodokushi. In Japan, Grace’s job of cleaning up after these death scenes is a legitimate profession.

“In Japan there are quite a number of lonely death cleaners because this is happening increasingly often as people are leading solitary lives. They die alone and lie undiscovered because there’s no-one to check on them. It’s incredibly sad and a real indictment of society. It was one of the things that moved me to write this book – how we got to be a society where this can happen. And, of course, it happens here too. There was a woman in Edinburgh who lay dead in her house for five years and no-one knew.

“We’re increasingly not as sociable as we used to be. Things that we used to have to interact with people to do, we can now do online – have meals delivered, movies streamed to our TVs – without having to go out and see other people.

“The pandemic has made it worse. There were recent figures on loneliness that showed that among the over-50s in Britain, two million described themselves as all alone and lonely, a rise of 49 per cent.”

In the book, Robertson describes the ubiquitous Glasgow tenements, and how few neighbours in the same closes know each other, let alone check on each other regularly.

“In times past, everybody knew each other and be able to go to each other’s doors but that’s not the case any more, partly because we are more guarded about letting people into our space, and partly because we’re not as sociable. In these tenements, residents will come and go rather than stay there for generations, so people don’t know their neighbours as well as they used to.”

The elderly are particularly at risk of loneliness, he added, because it’s far less common now to see extended families living together or near each other.

“We’re all guilty of seeing older people and imagining they were always old. I was coming to this novel from the point of view that everyone has a story and even the sweetest old man perhaps wasn’t that sweet, and that everyone has a past, for better or worse.”

l The Undiscovered Deaths Of Grace McGill by C S Robertson will be published by Hodder & Stoughton in hardback and eBook on January 20.