Rubbing Malt On The Wound
The strange world of Scottish whiskey forms the backdrop for Doug Johnstone’s fast-paced new crime novel. He explains why he has developed an aversion to fiction that is clever for its own sake and why the UK publishing industry is stacked against Scottish writers.
Peter Murphy, 20 Jan 2011
Musician, journalist and novelist Doug Johnstone’s third novel, Smokeheads, is one of the flagship books on Faber’s 2011 thriller list. Touted as the missing link between Sideways and The Wicker Man, it’s the high-octane tale of four 30-something gadabouts who embark on a whiskey tasting sortie to the island of Islay in the Inner Hebrides, and find themselves embroiled in a local police bootlegging conspiracy that culminates in multiple murders and exploding distilleries. Spicing chemical generation disaffection with Rankin-type tartan noir in all too familiar sub-zero temperatures, it’s a three-hour read.
“I’ve been drifting towards that more and more,” Johnstone says. “For years I’ve done book reviews and interviewed novelists, and over the years I’ve had less time for big books or complicated books: just keep it short and let me be able to read it and be entertained. It’s the idea of storytelling above all. Don’t get me wrong, I like a beautifully constructed sentence as much as the next literary fan, but something’s got to happen – like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.”
At least two of the book’s protagonists are self-styled single malt snobs. Presumably Johnstone’s research into Islay’s biggest export was more pleasurable than your average thriller writer’s trawl through state pathologists’ offices?
“I’ve always been a fan of whiskies, specifically the Islay ones,” he admits. “I did actually join the Scottish Malt Whiskey Society for a year, which was quite expensive and a bit up itself, but I joined anyway just to get some of these single cask things that you can’t get anywhere else. Not cheap, but good research! And I went back to Islay for a little tour, a long weekend, which was fairly messy. It’s a huge money-spinner, the whiskey industry, an unbelievable amount of time and money goes into the whole thing, and gets made by it. There are millions of these middle-aged men trying to get one up on each other about whiskey tasting. I don’t really have the palate for it, although I could tell you an Islay malt from a non-Islay one. I think that world is really funny. Iain Banks had an interesting book about it, it was like the Holy Grail, in search of the perfect malt, and of course he never finds it, but he has a good time trying. There is an element of the quest. It gets back to that Nick Hornby blokes thing, the infantile making of lists, the collecting. Boys seem to be a bit more OCD about that than girls.”
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