Written in Blood with Mason Cross

There’s a TV programme on CBS Reality at the moment where crime authors meet with Simon Toyne, a thriller author himself, to talk about the crime or crimes which ‘inspired’ them to write their novels.

Written in Blood (c) CBS Reality

Scottish author Mason cross was yesterday’s guest and he took viewers back to the spot where a childhood awareness of a crime made him think about wanting to write himself.

“I grew up in Cambuslang, a suburb on the south-east side of Glasgow. I remembered people used to talk about a pair of murders that happened when I was very young. In fact I was sure I remembered that one of them had taken place very close to my childhood home.”

Simon Toyne and Mason Cross on the programme

“The killings – vicious, apparently motiveless murders of lone women – took place in the autumn of 1982, when I was three years old. The first of the two victims, a female taxi driver, was found in her car in Braeside Place, the street behind the back garden of the house where my family lived. I remembered there was a gap in the fence where I used to cut through on my way to the shop.”

“I asked my dad about the night the taxi driver had been murdered, and he told me about being awoken in the middle of the night by the blue lights as the police investigated the scene. They had come around our street to canvas for witnesses the following day.”

When researching this crime in the local library Mason found that there was not a great deal of coverage and that what was there was sporadically and not the kind of coverage you might expect in today’ s media savvy world.

“Do I write crime fiction because I grew up with that awareness that evil can lurk in the most innocuous settings? It’s impossible to say.

Perhaps it’s one of the reasons I’ve always been fascinated by the way psychopaths can blend in, hide their true nature from the everyday world. The way relatives and friends and neighbours always express disbelief and confusion when they find out there was a monster in their midst. The shattering of the easy, comforting illusion that “this kind of thing doesn’t happen here.”

Catch up with Mason Cross books here