Dundee – Scotland’s fourth largest city looking over the North Sea. Fair to say the weather is not its top attraction, but it has some history – the jute industry, the setting off point for many a ship of exploration, a centre of Scotland’s media and publishing industry and, of course, the birthplace of Logan Roy! Dundee, aka city of “jute, jam and journalism”, now a bit poshed-up with the Scottish branch of London’s V&A Museum in town in an amazing new building – GQ named Dundee the “Coolest Little City in Britain”. There’s a bit of crime too obviously….so, the Dundee variant of the Tartan Noir phenomenon…
Let’s start with some old time Dundee. Prolific historical fiction novelist Malcolm Archibald has penned dozens of books, including the five-book Detective Watters series set in the grimy industrial Dundee of the 1860s. In The Fireraisers (2019) Detective Sergeant George Watters investigates after the Dundee mill of businessman Matthew Beaumont burns to the ground in 1862. Then a man is found dead in the hold of a trade ship. What links the murder and the strange events taking place in Dundee shipyard? In Murdered on the 13th (2020) Watters and his team investigate the murder of a local banker, found dead on the 13th tee of a local golf course. The cast of suspects include illicit prize-fighters, merchants and prostitutes all connected to the 1860s Dundee Victorian underworld. In The Scuttlers (2021) Watters investigates a string of burglaries of high-value shops and hotels across Dundee. And finally, in Not a Pukka Gentleman (2022) Watters investigates a series of child kidnappings around the same time a circus comes to Dundee and Watters raids an illegal gambling den.
The term “pukka” by the way is now well-known in British English for meaning excellent or superb, perhaps in this case ‘vouched for’. It comes from Hindi and shows the strong links between India and Britain during the era of Empire and Raj, a time Dundee rose high and made a lot of money.
Catriona McPherson’s The Mirror Dance (2021) and investigator Dandy Gilver encountering a murdered puppeteer found behind a Punch and Judy stand leaving bored children sitting cross-legged drinking ginger beer. The gruesome death seems to be inextricably bound to the gloomy offices of Doig’s Publishers, its secrets hidden in the real stories behind their girls’ magazines The Rosie Cheek and The Freckle. There are 16 Dandy Gilver mysteries set mostly in 1920s Perthshire in the aftermath of the First World War. Only The Mirror Dance takes place in Dundee while the rest of the series bounces around a load of Scottish locations.
A big swerve from 1920s flapper Dandy to Chris Longmuir’s four-book Dundee Crime series starts with Night Watcher (2013) as a killer targets Nicole – an unfaithful woman with a weakness for other women’s husbands. Dundee DS Bill Murphy must find the killer before he kills again. Dead Wood (2014) is Longmuir’s second thriller set in a dismal and dark Dundee (not the Dundee of Dandy Gilver!). DS Bill Murphy encounters nasty moneylenders and a possible serial killer terrorising the city. Missing Believed Dead (2013) goes even darker with missing children and internet predators. And lastly Web of Deceit (2022) has Tony Palmer, kingpin of Dundee’s underworld leading a charmed life until the morning he wakes up beside the dead body of the star pole dancer at Teasers nightclub. DS Bill Murphy investigates as Dundee finds itself slipping into a violent and deadly gang war. Longmuir lives in a seaside town in the county of Angus in Scotland, midway between Aberdeen and Dundee. Her book Dead Wood won the Dundee International Book Prize.
Dundonian Wendy H Jones has a series too set in the city – the eight-book DI Shona McKenzie Mysteries. In the first book, Killer’s Countdown (2014), Shona has recently returned to Scotland after service in the Royal Navy and is now in Dundee working with the local knowledge of Sergeant Peter Johnston and his team to help her track down a killer. Through subsequent books Shona McKenzie tramps the snow bound streets of the city in winter, solves murders linked to the city’s churches, severed body parts dumped at local beauty spots around Dundee, bodies dumped around the Gothic cemeteries of the city, and a case with a link to another port city, New Orleans and the Louisiana Bayou. And lastly, in Killer’s Cure (2023), Shona is tasked with solving the case of the unexpected deaths of several women, all of whom were hospital inpatients in Dundee. Across the city you’ll get to see pretty much everywhere of note in Dundee and the surrounding County of Angus.
Dundee can be a tough town as shown in local journalist Alexander McGregor’s The Law Killers: True Crime from Dundee (2022) including Dundee’s most notorious serial killer, a schoolboy killer, father-and-son murderers and the almost perfect murder that stumped Dundee.
And finally, for something a bit different – Liverpool-born of a Polish family, Scottish educated Hania Allen writes the Polish Detective series featuring DI Dania Gorska, also of Polish heritage. In the first book in the series, The Polish Detective (2018), Dania Korsika is a stranger in a foreign land. Born in Poland and transferred from London to Dundee’s specialist crime division, she is tasked with investigating a series of grotesque killings where the victims are first brutally murdered and then displayed in a bizarre manner. In Clearing the Dark (2019) Dania is up against the local mob investigating the shooting of a young man on a Dundee street, the nail hammered into his forehead suggests that local gangster, Archie McLellan, head of the infamous local gangsters the McLellan family. In Family Business (2020) Dania is hunting for a missing boy in the north of Dundee, but the case raises past unsolved missing children’s cases. The Murder Stones (2022) see Dania investigating a traffic accident that maybe wasn’t so accidental and is linked to the inheritance of a local estate. In The Unexpected Guest (2023) Dania is called back to Poland to investigate a case that links back to her old town and her former teachers. And lastly in the series (so far) The Maze (2024) see Dania back in Dundee looking at the dead body of an Italian man in the countryside outside Dundee with a gun in his hand. Everyone assumes suicide, but Dania is not convinced. A good series if you, like Dania, want to see Dundee through an outsider’s eyes.
