A U T H O R    I N T E R V I E W S P A U L    J O H N S T O N www.paul-johnston.co.uk Interviewed by John Connolly At first sight, the Point Hotel on Bread Street is not the most promising of locations from which to begin a tour of Edinburgh's darker corners, for The Point is rather clean and modern and so minimalist that it's hardly there at all. (Only the taxi driver's willingness to jab his finger in its general direction and shout "Luuuuuk!" a couple of times means that I don't end up sleeping on the streets.) Yet pause a second and the choice of the Point as a base suddenly begins to seem remarkably fortuitous. Slip around the corner of Bread Street to High Riggs (past the unsavoury but undeniably popular Burke & Hare stripper bar) and you are in Complicity territory, for it is in a fish shop on High Riggs that a body is found gruesomely gutted on a slab in the course of Iain Banks's startling thriller. Alternatively, turn right toward Earl Grey Street and Tollcross Fire Station comes into view, in which an unfortunate female in Ian Rankin's Mortal Causes has acid poured down her throat. Five minutes walk from there is the Usher Hall, where a body is found strangled, minus its liver, in Paul Johnston's Body Politic. Given that Johnston and Rankin have written about 20 crime novels between them, the life expectancy of modern literary characters in Edinburgh is, it would appear, pretty short. Edinburgh's literary credentials are beyond dispute. Stevenson and Burns walked its streets, Sir Walter Scott gazes out from beneath his vast, churchlike monument at the shoppers on Princes Street, Thomas de Quincey is buried in St Cuthbert's Churchyard, and writers as diverse as Tobias Smollett, J.M. Barrie and Charles Dickens all had links with the city. Yet Edinburgh's literary links to crime, adventure and intrigue go back further than the city's modern chroniclers such as Rankin, Johnston, Banks, the satirical crime novelist Christopher Brookmyre and Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting. On Leith Walk stands a statue of Sherlock Holmes, erected in honour of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who studied medicine at Edinburgh University and who used the Edinburgh lecturer and surgeon Joseph Bell as his model for Holmes. John Buchan, author of The Thirty Nine Steps, worked in Edinburgh for a time with the Nelson publishing house and R.M. Ballantyne, author of the adventure classic Coral Island, was born in Ann Street. Ian Rankin, writing in the Scotsman in 1997, suggested that "the very nature of Scotland's capital - cool, detached, furtive, clandestine - lends itself to novels of intrigue. . . [it is] a secret city." Paul Johnston, another fine writer who uses Edinburgh - albeit the Edinburgh of the near future - as the settings for his crime novels, concurs: "A lot of this darkness definitely comes from the city's history. There have been violent deeds, perfidious kings and queens, hypocritical Calvinists and a worrying love of filthy lucre. " It is Johnston who has agreed to act as guide and commentator on the city's troubled history, both real and imagined, an act of surprising goodwill given the fact that he may be nursing a slight hangover following the launch of his new book, The House of Dust. Johnston's Edinburgh is a repressed city, a police state that makes its money from tourists and a year-round festival. In other words, it's only partly made-up. "In my novels, I'm interested in playing with the continuum that runs from Edinburgh's past," Johnston explains. "It stretches from the philosopher Hume, Robert Louis Stevenson, the city's architecture, through the present day gap between Edinburgh's aspirations and its social problems, and into the future. But the legacy of the past is always there." It is hard to escape Edinburgh's bloody history. The Grassmarket, close by the Point Hotel, was for many years the location of choice for the city's public executions. While some unfortunates were sent on their way by the Maiden, Edinburgh's version of the guillotine, and female prisoners were sometimes drowned, the most popular mode of dispatch was hanging, often for offences that might seem quite trivial today. Thomas Urquhart and George Warden were executed in 1770 for the comparatively minor crime of opening letters that didn't belong to them, although it is probably safe to say that few went to the gallows less willingly than John Porteous, the unpopular captain of the town guard who was sentenced to be hanged in 1736 for opening fire on a crowd of demonstrators, killing three of them. He was reprieved by Queen Anne but a mob, enraged by the decision, broke into the Old Tolbooth on the Royal Mile, dragged Porteous down to the Grassmarket and hanged him themselves. The Porteous lynching subsequently found literary expression in Sir Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian. It was on High Street, just below the Grassmarket, that one of Edinburgh's most famous executions took place. On January 28th, 1829, 25,000 people watched William Burke hang. Burke and his partner, William Hare, both Irish immigrants, lured up to 30 of the city's indigents to their deaths and then sold their bodies to the medical schools. Hare gave evidence against Burke in order to avoid charges, and he and his wife later settled in London. Burke and Hare's former dwelling house is on West Port, steps away from the Point Hotel. Even the heavily-touristed surrounds of Edinburgh Castle have older, bloodier memories embedded in their stones. Over 300 witches were strangled, then burnt, at Castlehill between 1479 and 1722, more than in any other part of the Kingdom of Scotland. Among them was the unlucky Agnes Fynnie, who was probably guilty of little more than being tetchy with her neighbours, and the beautiful Lady Jane Douglas, who was accused of witchcraft by a rejected suitor, William Lyon, then tortured and burnt alive before her son and husband in 1537. Standing below the gates of Edinburgh Castle, with the city spread out before us, Johnston points out George Heriot's School on Lauriston Place, built in the 17th century by the goldsmith and jeweller popularly known as "Jinglin' Geordie" for the education of "puir, fatherless bairns". "That's a classic combination of Edinburgh double standards," Johnston explains. "An educational establishment to benefit poor students set up by a financier who benefited from an autocratic monarch. The point about Edinburgh is the hypocrisy, the classic fur coat and 'nae knickers' mentality, the fear of being found out and shamed in public. Glasgow is much more open and in your face - violent and hedonistic, and proud of it - but Edinburgh provides more fertile ground for writers, and crime writers in particular, because of its dual nature." This dual nature found its most potent expression in the character of one "Deacon" Brodie. William Brodie was a respected cabinet-maker and locksmith by day, but gambler, whorer and thief by night. Following a failed attempt to rob the General Excise Office in Chessel's Court, Brodie fled to the Continent but was brought back and executed in 1788 on a gallows of his own design. A statue of Brodie stands in a stairway at the Lawnmarket but, perhaps more intriguingly, one of Brodie's cabinets can be found among the former possessions of Robert Louis Stevenson in the small Writer's Museum at Lady Stair's Close. The cabinet once stood in Stevenson's bedroom and the future creator of The Strange Case of Dr Jeyll and Mr Hyde, the classic study of man's repressed dark side, could not have been ignorant of the cabinet's provenance. Its presence among his possessions lends considerable support to those who claim that it is Edinburgh, rather than London, that provided the real inspiration and true setting for the novel. Deacon Brodie's history also influenced Muriel Spark, for the titular character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a woman torn between romance and her own repressed nature, is a direct descendant of the infamous criminal. With such a past, it is hardly surprising that Edinburgh has cast a shadow across the imagination of its native writers, but the architecture and geography of the city itself is also a factor. "It's the physical nature of the city that has influenced me most", says Johnston, "a series of sharp perpendiculars that suggest lofty ambitions and philosophies at the top and dirty physicality in the festering cellars." Those cellars are quite literally present. During times of war, the citizenry would hide below ground and wait for the crisis to pass. The revelation of this aspect of the city's hidden life is ongoing: construction workers continue to uncover underground cellars, occasionally still occupied by the remains of those who found their final refuge there. Edinburgh is a peculiarly brooding city, dominated by old architecture and older natural formations, the bulk of Castle Rock rising above the buildings in the Old Town to the south while Arthur's Seat and the Salisbury Crags hover threateningly to the east. Viewed in this way, and refracted through the prism of the city's past and the dark light shone upon it by its writers, the stag parties lurching down the infamous Rose Street drag and the sentimental tourists queueing to have their photograph taken alongside Greyfriars Bobby seem strangely out of place, as if they have wandered by mistake into a landscape and a history far stranger than they could ever imagine. SUGGESTED READING The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark Body Politic by Paul Johnston Set in Darkness by Ian Rankin The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stephenson Complicity by Iain Banks Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh The Literary Companion to Edinburgh by Andrew Lownie TRAVEL DETAILS The Point Hotel, 34 Bread Street ( 0044 131 221 5555) has rooms from ST£80, although those who prefer a more traditional hotel experience should probably look elsewhere. The Edinburgh & Lothians Tourist Board (00 44 131 473 3800) will arrange accommodation for a ST£3 booking fee. For an unusual dining experience, The Witchery, 352 Castlehill (00 44 131 225 5613) is one of the most atmospheric restaurants in the city, with a wine list the size of a telephone directory. Boswell and Dr Johnson are reputed to have dined there and, while dinner is expensive, it does have a very reasonable lunch and pre-theatre menu. Milne's, at 35 Hanover Street, is a long-established haunt for Edinburgh's literati, while those with a taste for crime can pop in for a pint at the Oxford Bar, the watering hole of Ian Rankin's detective, Rebus. Just don't mention Rankin or Rebus. The Oxford isn't really that kind of bar. The Writer's Museum is located at Lady Stair's Close, Lawnmarket (0131 529 4901) and entry is free. The National Library of Scotland, George IV Bridge (0131 226 4531) is hosting a photographic exhibition on Scottish writers until October 31st 2001, and entry is free.