Liam Rudden: Dr Dunbar's back to investigate secrets of Dryburgh Abbey

Published on Friday 26 February 2010 09:07

DR STEPHEN DUNBAR is no ordinary physician. He first appeared in Ken McClure's 1998 novel Donor (a new paperback edition of which is published on 1 May) and later this year will embark upon a new investigation. But more of that later.

Anyone with the slightest interest in crime writing will know the names Rebus and Skinner – perhaps the Capital's most famous fictional crime fighters.

But Dr Stephen Dunbar? Well, Dunbar is the creation of Edinburgh-born author (and scientist) McClure, and is by far one of the most intriguing crime fighters to grace the fiction shelves over the last decade.

An ex-Para, who fell into medicine to acquiesce to his parents' wishes, Dunbar eschewed the everyday things of being a GP in favour of field medicine with the Special Forces.

Now in his mid-30s he has been recruited by an elite government agency, the Sci-Med Inspectorate, which is charged with investigating high-tech crime in the world of science and medicine.

"What makes Stephen interesting is that he always tries to do the right thing. It might not always be the legal thing or the moral thing, but because of the situation as he sees it, he tries to do the right thing and that can give him a hard time," the author once told me.

That, and that fact that McClure sets many of Dunbar's investigations in and around Edinburgh (arguably the most recognisable Edinburgh of any in the genre) put his books at the top of my reading list.

Ironically, while you will be hard-pressed to find many of them in local book stores, in Eastern Europe, Dunbar's adventures have made McClure a best-selling author with regular TV appearances.

While Dunbar was introduced in the book Donor, his employers first featured four years earlier, in a novel called Chameleon. Then, the man of the hour was Dr Neil Anderson, but when Sci-Med returned three books and three years later, however, he had been replaced by the far more down to earth operative, who proved an instant hit with readers.

In his first investigation, Dunbar found himself investigating sinister goings-on at Medic Ecosse, a state-of-the-art private hospital in Edinburgh.

He returned in Deception a year later, when he arrived in a West Lothian village to look into an illegal genetically modified crop.

In 2002 he was back in Wildcard, a gory tale of an Ebola-like outbreak and then in 2004, The Gulf Conspiracy found McClure and Dunbar tackling the causes of gulf war syndrome.

Just 12 months on, The Eye Of The Raven found Dunbar bemused, as the deathbed confession of a convicted psychopath sparked another case, while the 2007 novel, The Lazarus Strain, pitched him against al-Qaida operatives.

White Death, his last outing, in 2008, found our hero at the centre of another conspiracy when McClure posed the question: If terrorists embark upon a biological attack, can enough vaccine be produced in time to save lives?

His latest work to feature Dunbar, the author's 22nd book and the good Doctor's eighth outing, however, delves back into history for its focus.

Dust To Dust, as McClure, pictured left, revealed in his last interview for The Guide, sees Dunbar caught up in the current medical dispute over the cause of the 14th century outbreak of the Black Death.

Everybody thinks it was bubonic plague, but there is quite a strong body of evidence to suggest that it wasn't a bacterium but a virus.

In Dust To Dust, Dunbar must investigate a secret tomb of preserved bodies from that time under Dryburgh Abbey in the Scottish Borders.

Dust To Dust is published by Birlinn/Polygon, also on 1 May. I for one can't wait.