My Life in Crime by Aline Templeton 18 November 2022

After her aborted visit last winter, victim of severe weather in the south-east, the Lit. Soc was delighted to welcome the acclaimed “Crime Czar” of Small-Town Scotland, revealing her life in crime. Like a mistress of the trade of crime fiction, she set the scene for the audience with a reading from the opening chapter of her novel “The Devil’s Garden” whose pace and intrigue swiftly evoked the requisite uneasy, dramatic tension. Her first faltering steps on the pathway to entry into the contemporary canon of Scottish crime fiction began at age 6 with a fierce grasp of the pencil and learning to fashion printed script. Mystery intruded even in this account of the prototype Mr. Wiz and Mrs. Woz’s weekend in Paris leaving her early readership to ponder on how this adventure was received by the travelling couple’s respective partners. The urge to write has turned out to be a lifelong compulsion. Aline was always a bibliophile and still regards her introduction to her local lending library as a foretaste of Heaven. Reading and writing were her thing although a summer placement in her local library, prior to reading English at Cambridge, proved a mixed blessing. Staff had the privilege of access to the “blue” books, literature deemed unsuitable for an undiscriminating public to consume, and thus the opportunity to thoroughly round off their liberal education but also the burden of hunting down and matching the missing tickets which formed the basis of the classification system in that pre-computer era. Our speaker recounted the discomfiture of the prim chief librarian who eventually yielded to an insistent customer’s demand to see the blue books and his confusion when confronted with this treasure trove of forbidden literary fruit. The engaged citizen had merely been requesting the Government Reports which always bore blue covers!

After graduation and her entry into the teaching profession, she continued to be a slave to the impulse to write. Initial published success was modest with articles in magazines and newspapers but convincing publishers to support her work was a heroic enterprise. She was drawn into crime fiction, an expanding field channelled and amplified by a plethora of crime programmes on television and the conviction among a growing proportion of the population that crime fiction reflected the inherently unfair nature of life. Wigtown Book Festival, the Scottish equivalent of Hay on Wye, provided the launch pad for her first book, honed for the market by the advice of a ruthless agent. Her first 6 books were set in England, but her Edinburgh base and her direct experience of the Scottish Legal System as a Justice of the Peace prompted a switch to rural Scottish settings. Eschewing the fashion for flawed detectives – alcoholics, drug addicts, victims of bipolar disorders – she summoned D.I. Marjory Fleming from her imagination; a farmer’s wife with 2 teenage children and a stable personality. The nine novels in which Fleming is the central figure are set in Galloway, the neglected south-west corner of Scotland, where an impressive backdrop of sea and hills fails to forestall the social devastation caused by the collapse of the fishing industry and an influx of part absentee second home owners. The centralising of the previously regionally based Scottish Police Service demanded a new main protagonist, the maverick DCI. Kelso Strang, a bereaved widower, and former Army officer who can be “parachuted” into remote Scottish locations on an ad hoc basis. Aline acknowledged a transition in her work with the later books being character driven. The abiding impression left from her time with the Law was of the “criminal stupidity” of many of the delinquents; admittedly she only saw the ones who allowed themselves to be caught. It will be intriguing to observe how the reset of her work-life equilibrium after her recent move from Edinburgh to Tenterden affects her literary output. Will the rugged, remote Scottish literary universe she created survive immersion in the soft South?

The evening closed with a Q&A in which the writer divulged she was not a tightly planned, detailed spreadsheet author but one who wrote linearly, allowing the plot flexibility as the characters increasingly took on a life of their own. The books are written to entertain and carry no hidden message and our speaker approvingly endorsed the definition offered by Miss Prism, the governess in Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”, “The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.” Pressed to choose a favourite from her work she opted for “The Devil’s Garden” and “Evil for Evil”. Our evening ended happily with a loose scrum forming round the speaker’s table as the audience invested in samples of the Templeton oeuvre, thoughtfully provided in a variety of formats.

William Doherty