Knots & Crosses [antikvár]

The nineteenth of March 1985 was a big day for me. I was a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, studying the novels of Muriéi Spark. My thesis, however, was proving less important to me than my own writing. I'd started with poetry, then found somé minor success with short stories. A first növel had failed to find a publisher, but my second attempt had just been given the thumbs-up by a small Edinburgh-based outfit called Polygon. That növel was titled The Flood, and on 19 March I went to the Polygon offices to sign my first ever book contract. I recorded the event in my diary, where, however, it was reduced to second biliing after the following: 'It's happened. An idea for a növel (crime thriller) which started as one situation and has blossomed into a whole plot. I've not written any of it yet, but it's all there in my head, from page one to circa page 250.' By 22 March I was working on this new story, and two days later recorded that 'it needs a working title; I'm going to give it Knots & Crosses'. I certainly remember sitting in a chair in my bedsit, directly in front of the gas fire, and toying with the pun of noughts/knots and crosses. Rebus, it seems to me now, entered as a fully förmed character, complete with estranged wife, young daughter and fragile sanity. When I started writing, I did so on an electric typewriter, at the table by the window. I stared from that window at the tenement opposite, and decided that Rebus would live there, directly across from my own digs at 24 Arden Street, Marchmont, Edinburgh. By late October, I had finished the second draught of the book: 'two hundred and ten pages of sixty per cent