Maestro of the mean

THE LAST TIME ALLAN GUTHRIE WENT back to his native Orkney, he noticed that the local paper had started a crime column. The police chief was chewing over the latest act of law-breaking on the island. "Some old lady's plant pot had been taken out of her garden and dumped in the middle of the road," he says, trying to smother a smile. "Not the stuff of dark crime fiction."

And Guthrie, who's now Edinburgh-based, writes dark crime fiction. They don't come much darker than Two-Way Split, his first novel, just published in this country. It's the story of three petty crooks who turn on each other, a raid on an Edinburgh post office which goes violently wrong, a crooked private eye and a thug just out of jail, vengeance on his mind. It has shootings, knifings, strangulation and a nasty scene involving a desk drawer.

Two-Way Split was published in the US last year and has been getting rave reviews on crime fiction websites. Guthrie's second novel, Kiss Her Goodbye, has been picked up by new US publisher Hard Case Crime, which is publishing reprinted and original noir fiction to considerable acclaim. It will shortly publish Stephen King's first crime novel with an initial print run of one million. The UK and Commonwealth rights to both Guthrie novels have been bought by Polygon, the Edinburgh publisher.

Those familiar with Guthrie's persona on his website, Noir Originals, might expect a brooding, surly bloke. On the contrary, he's an affable sort, who, despite his deft grasp of the darker echelons of the criminal mind, wouldn't so much as move an old lady's plant pot into the middle of the street.

He describes fellow British noir writers Ken Bruen and Jason Starr as "the nicest people I know". "It's bizarre because if you read the stuff that any of these guys write, me included, you might be scared of meeting them in a dark alley. A number of people have read Two-Way Split and made certain assumptions about what the author's like, and I'm highly disappointing to them. I don't drink, I don't eat meat, that's very disappointing for a hard-boiled writer."

A break is required for some definitions. Guthrie writes "noir" fiction: crime fiction about criminals, rather than about detectives. It's a genre forged by American mass-market paperbacks, spearheaded by writers such as James M Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity), David Goodis and Jim Thompson. While detective novels have an authority figure and move towards a solution - crimes solved, baddies apprehended, order restored - noir just gets darker.

"Noir tends to be about petty criminals, with a small cast, very emotionally involved, and everybody is totally screwed," says Guthrie happily, stirring his cappuccino. "Noir focuses on the criminal mind, not a whodunit, more why they did it and will they get away with it. The abnormal psychology is what fascinates me rather than the puzzle-solving aspect."

A typical noir protagonist will be tormented, flawed. A "hard-boiled" novel, on the other hand, will have a tough, fast-talking anti-hero who is capable of both unthinking violence and charming chivalry. "Chandler is quintessentially hard-boiled, with tough wise-cracking private investigator Philip Marlowe, who is also a bit of knight in shining armour. But," he hesitates, "it's possible to be hard-boiled and not noir, just as it's possible to be noir and not hard-boiled. And it is possible to be both. People debate endlessly what is hard-boiled and what is noir."

Having cleared that up nicely, he goes on to explain that Two-Way Split has both a noir protagonist - Robin Greaves, a failed pianist with a split personality - and a hard-boiled one, in the shape of Pearce, a big strong guy with a good heart, who's capable of killing anyone he thinks deserves it, but still loves his old mum. They're woven into a lean, vivid novel. Barely a page passes without action, and there are barely 200 pages in total. "Not too much introspection, descriptions of sunsets," Guthrie grins. "No gratuitous scenery. And it seems true that this kind of book does work out better short. There aren't many writers I know turning out 400- or 500-page novels. There's only so much pain you can bear."

Noir books, he says, tend to make good movies. There has always been a close connection between noir fiction and film: Chandler and Hitchcock are a case in point, and in fact the "noir" tag was first used to describe the cinema. In addition to two further novels which are nearly finished, Guthrie is working on two screenplays, Two-Way Split, which has been shortlisted for the BBC/Scottish Screen project Fast Forward Features, and The Wheel Man, by fellow noir writer Duane Swierczynski. Both are earmarked to be made by Edinburgh-based Plum Productions with director Simon Hynd.

Guthrie, 40, wrote his first novel aged nine (an "Enid Blyton inspired" mystery with a series of murders in it), his second at 16 ("the usual teen angst stuff, a bit Kafka, a bit Camus and a bit crap; actually very crap, but good practice") and his third at 20 ("very strange, pseudo literary").

He narrowly avoided a career as a musician; he left Orkney for music school in Manchester at age 14, and became a founder member of the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, playing bassoon. "Music was something I was encouraged to do, which I appeared to be quite good at, but it was never a passion. Writing was always my first love."

He worked in IT, then as a bookseller until about five years ago when he decided he would rather write books than sell them. "I decided that if I really wanted to be a pianist, I would learn how to play. I wouldn't just sit down and play the same thing over and over again, I'd learn technique. I applied that same principle to writing." He read dozens of books about craft, and still claims that he has "no talent", only learned skill.

He promptly wrote three novels, the last of which was Two-Way Split, which, in synopsis form, won the Crime Writer's Association Debut Dagger. Its US publishers Point Blank offered him a job as their acquisitions editor, and the imprint is notching up considerable success helping writers into high-profile deals elsewhere, not least Guthrie himself, with Hard Case Crime.

Hard Case has taken the idea that noir is an outdated phenomenon of the 1940s and 1950s and turned it into a retro success story. Its list, launched last year, consists of reprints and original books, packaged in glorious retro style covers, with trilby-wearing gumshoes and busty blondes. At the same time, their critical success proves that noir, far from being pulp fiction, is a place for good writing and serious ideas.

"Kiss Her Goodbye is a very serious book," says Guthrie. "What Hard Case is saying is that you can be popular and literary. Hard Case is publishing it with a pulp fiction cover, Polygon is saying it's literary fiction. It's exactly the same book, it all depends on your perspective."

Paradoxically, a book about criminals is an ideal place for a discussion of morality, as it deals with life on the edge where people are forced to consider rules - and break them. "Everything I write is in some sense a conversation about morality. Is there such a thing as good or bad? I don't think so. I think it's all shades of grey. Is there a kind of morality in this immoral world? I don't really know that there is."

The potential of crime writing to unpack serious issues is nothing new, Guthrie says. The best writers had it sussed centuries ago. "Dostoevsky was a crime writer, but no-one ever thinks of him like that. All his books are concerned with death or murder. He is incredibly noir. Or Shakespeare. Or the Greek dramatists. There's nothing more noir than Titus Andronicus and Oedipus Rex."

Two-Way Split by Allan Guthrie is published by Polygon. Kiss Her Goodbye will be published by Polygon in March. Visit www.allanguthrie.co.uk