The Blackhouse

THE BLACKHOUSE is the first novel in Peter May’s Lewis trilogy, police procedurals set on the Isle of Lewis out in the Scottish Hebrides. It’s a novel about the isolation, the traditions that built out of that isolation, and the history of a protagonist who goes home, reluctantly, in order to investigate a crime.

I bought it after seeing May at the Adelaide Writers Festival a few years back, then hearing people rave about his books over and over. I spent the entire read with a notecard beside me, jotting down page numbers where he deployed techniques I could lift for my own projects.

Then it became a process of jotting down page numbers purely because May delivered a great description, deploying language with a precision that a lot of writers never manage. The Isle of Lewis may be a real place–the kind you can visit and touch and walk through–but for the vast majority of readers it needs to be constructed as carefully as any fantasy setting. 

It’s a detective story, but very little of it is really about the detective. It’s about a place that’s Other, and what it means to come from there. What it means to have started there and learned to survive in another world by forgetting it.

Recommended.