BLOODY Scotland. No, I am not being rude about our beloved Caledonia. I refer instead to the annual Scottish crime writing festival which this week unveiled a new award for women authors. Together with the announcement of a Dundee University course to teach writers about detective work and forensics, the business of crime, or writing about it, is booming in Scotland. Wonder what Chief Inspector Taggart would make of that?

If the Sherlock Holmes of Maryhill was to investigate all the fictional killings perpetrated by Scottish authors over the course of a year it would indeed be murder – on his feet. Ian Rankin, Denise Mina and Val McDermid alone would have his varicose veins louping.

It is not just Scots authors making a killing out of the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for murder. Tales of crime also feature in the top 10 of bestseller lists, and one can hardly swing a net on television without hitting a programme featuring sleuths and slayers. If it is not fictional, it is factual, with the true crime genre also flourishing on the back of the groundbreaking podcast, Serial. Dr Aliki Varvogli, who will be lecturing on the new MLitt course at Dundee, told The Herald that the most borrowed books from libraries are crime novels. 

Crime has become such an accepted part of the entertainment industry it takes an effort to stand back from the fray and question whether this obsession of ours is wise. It is human nature after all to shun that which we fear. Few of us in reality would want to come within a million miles of a killer, so why do we spend small fortunes entering their worlds? If you don’t think it is a small fortune, have a look at your bookshelves. My own cache, including a complete set of Michael Connellys and Sara Paretskys, could have paid for a couple of city breaks once upon a time.

One has to wonder, too, what absorbing all this second hand distress does to our mental health. Crime fiction has always had its more hardcore exponents, but there is a new breed of authors out there who want to sear images into the reader’s brain and send them reeling with shock. Given the victims in such works are generally women, this trend is doubly repellent.

Being a woman should be enough on its own to turn anyone off fictional crime. It has become almost routine for the first 15 minutes of a TV crime drama to feature a female body either lying on waste ground or on a mortuary slab. If they did this with animals there would be an outcry; but women, well, that’s just tradition, the way it has always been.

One could flip all these arguments in favour of crime fiction. Reading about dreadful events is a much needed safety valve in a random and sometimes dangerous world. Money spent on good crime fiction is worth it because reading gives us enjoyment, a chance to switch off. It is far better for one’s health than booze and fags and there are no carbs in murder at one remove. 

As for the charge of exploiting women, one has to take heart that some of the best crime writers, from Christie and Highsmith to Rendell and McDermid, are women, and few of them are guilty of using their gender to provide cheap thrills. Some, such as Denise Mina in her brilliant Garnethill trilogy, are the doughtiest champions of the female underdog.

At heart, fans of crime fiction are literature’s innocents. They seek out a world in which bad people do awful things, only to be caught by good people for the right reasons. The hero or heroine dispensing justice does not even need to be wholly “good”. Witness the avenging angel that is ex-military policeman Jack Reacher, Lee Child’s gazillion books-selling creation. Life in a crime novel is simple, predictable, and satisfying, and who does not want a some of that balance in the hurly burly that is modern life?

So good luck to all of those who apply for the MLitt at Dundee. We await a new batch of Scots crime novelists with anticipation. Who knows, one of their novels might be set on a postgrad course at a Scots university in which the students mysteriously begin to be bumped off one by one. I’d buy that.

Twins, George? It’s just as well you earn a bean selling coffee

IT was not your typical birth announcement. Welcoming Ella and Alexander Clooney into the world, and confirming all was tickety-boo with mum after the birth, a spokesman for the Hollywood actor added: “George is sedated and should recover in a few days.”

What fun Clooney, a first-time father at the age of 56, has to wake up to. Up through the night for feeds and nappy changes, all times two, it is just as well he earns a bean advertising coffee as he is going to be drinking a lot of it to stay awake.

No word yet whether any photos of the newborns will be released. The last comparable event in Hollywood terms was the birth of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s twins, Vivienne and Knox. The first photos of them, according to one source, went for $14 million, with the money going to the former couple’s charitable foundation.

Changed days from when the cash from baby pictures, like the money from wedding photos, was just another source of income for (usually D list) celebrities. The Clooneys, including their newest members, do not need the money, but if mum and dad can liberate some millions from rich publishers and give it to children in desperate need we can all raise a cup of cheer, filled with Nespresso or otherwise, to that.

Presidential fact turning out to be stranger than fiction

THERE is a war going on between Washington and the entertainment industry over who can present the most outrageous portrait of contemporary American politics.

In Homeland, a woman president wreaks revenge after an attempted coup d’etat. In the new series of House of Cards, Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood, facing defeat on election day, conspires to shut down polling stations, leading some states to challenge the final result and placing the entire American political system in a state of suspended animation.

Coming soon is Monica and Linda, an Amazon Studios film based on the one-time friendship between Monica Lewinsky and Linda Tripp. It was Tripp who gave the former White House intern advice on dry cleaning. Look how that turned out.

Back in the real world, there is an ex-FBI chief, sacked by the boss, describing to Congress a scene that could have been straight out of House of Cards by way of The Sopranos. “The President said, ‘I need loyalty, I expect loyalty’,” James Comey recalled. “I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence.”

On balance, I think reality is edging it.