Some writers leave you with a plot. Others leave you with a place, and Peter May was one of those. Anyone who has read The Blackhouse can still feel the wind scouring the Butt of Lewis, smell the peat smoke and see the men of Ness rowing out to the guga hunt on that bare, bird-slicked rock. May died on Friday 25 September at his holiday home in the south of France, aged 74. His publisher, riverrun, put it in three words: "He is irreplaceable."
He was a Glaswegian and a thrawn one, expelled from school for being too rebellious and named Young Journalist of the Year at 21. At 26, he published his first novel, The Reporter, which the BBC adapted, sending him into television for the best part of two decades, during which he wrote and produced Take the High Road and the Gaelic-language drama Machair. Machair was set on Lewis, and so, by way of a soap opera and a great deal of rain, he found the island that would make his name.
He left television in 1996 to write novels full time. The China Thrillers came first, beginning with The Firemaker, followed by the Enzo Files, set in France, where by then he was living in the Lot. He later took French citizenship. The French adored him and gave him a good many literary prizes.
The Blackhouse had a less gilded start. No English-language publisher wanted it at first, so it appeared in French translation from Éditions du Rouergue in 2010. It came out in English a year later and went round the world. The Lewis Man and The Chessmen followed, and the Lewis Trilogy became the work readers most associate with him. Fin Macleod is a detective who goes home to an island he spent years trying to forget, and the trilogy is really about the tidal pull of the place you come from. Entry Island won Scottish Crime Novel of the Year in 2014, and around 15 million copies of his books have now sold worldwide.
Then there is Lockdown, a story May must have enjoyed telling. He wrote it in six weeks in 2005: London in the grip of a deadly flu pandemic, the city sealed off. Publishers turned it down as implausible. It sat in a drawer for fifteen years until the spring of 2020, when it suddenly looked like reportage, and he gave the profits to charities supporting health workers.
He had announced his retirement and was looking forward to spending it with his wife, the writer Janice Hally. He was a gifted musician too, and last year released an album, Towards the Light. But there was one more novel in him. He delivered Island of the Dead in July, and it will be published in January 2027. He had been planning a farewell tour of Scotland and Lewis to go with it. That makes his death at this moment particularly cruel. It also means the last word is his.
Where to begin
Start on Lewis. The Blackhouse sends Fin Macleod home from Edinburgh to investigate a murder that echoes one he could never solve, and The Lewis Man and The Chessmen follow. The trilogy is all of a piece and best read in the gloaming, with the curtains drawn. When you have finished, The Black Loch brings Fin back ten years on, trying to clear his own son of murder.
The Lewis Trilogy: all three books for £10.99
May's Hebrides reached well beyond Fin. Coffin Road opens on a Harris beach, where a man comes to with no memory and a creeping fear of what he may have done. I'll Keep You Safe follows a Lewis tweed maker home from Paris with her husband's ashes and a French detective's suspicions close behind. A Silent Death swaps the islands for southern Spain, where a fugitive's vendetta against a policewoman meets a dogged Scottish investigator.
Dead Reckoning: all three books for £10.99
For something sunnier, if no less lethal, try the Enzo Files. Enzo Macleod is a Scottish forensic scientist teaching in Toulouse who takes on France's coldest cases for a bet. Extraordinary People leads him into the catacombs of Paris, Blacklight Blue finds him ill, framed and hunted, and in Cast Iron a drought gives up the bones of a girl murdered fourteen years earlier.
Enzo's Wager: all three books for £10.99
Island of the Dead arrives in January. We shall be reading it slowly.
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