Your best mate just fell off a cliff in mysterious circumstances. You
were the last person to see him alive. What do you do?
If you're David Lindsay from Arbroath, you leg it – and don’t go back. Not for fifteen years.
Then Nicola Cruickshank – yes, that Nicola, the girl you always fancied but never had the guts to speak to – gets in touch. She wants you back for a school reunion. At the very place it happened. Of course you say yes. Not to lay ghosts to rest, but because you still fancy Nicola.
The thing is, if you are David Lindsay, then returning to Arbroath isn’t going to bring closure. Because when someone else tumbles off the cliffs – an act the locals now call tombstoning – David has a choice: run away again, or finally find out why people around him keep dying...
When I heard that Tombstoning was being reissued for its twentieth anniversary, complete with an introduction by Christopher Brookmyre, I wondered how this early novel would feel two decades on. I needn’t have worried. This is a five-star read all over again: darkly funny, sharply observed and quietly devastating.
At the heart of the novel is David Lindsay, who fled Arbroath fifteen years ago after his best friend Colin fell to his death from the cliffs. David was the last person to see him alive. Colin had everything to live for. He was walking in the opposite direction. None of it made sense. So David did the only thing he felt capable of doing; he ran.
Now living in Edinburgh and working as a web designer, David is lured back to his hometown for a school reunion by Nicola Cruickshank. Yes, that Nicola, the one he always fancied and never quite had the courage to approach, although he has a hazy memory of a New Year's Eve snog. His motivations for returning are quite self serving, and that’s one of the things I loved most about this story. David is flawed, often selfish, occasionally cowardly, but always utterly believable.
The author's writing is tight and purposeful; there are no wasted words, or scenes. The pacing is beautifully controlled, the tension building really subtly that I sometimes didn’t realise quite how anxious I’d become until another death at the cliffs; an act now known locally as “tombstoning" made me feel quite terrified. It's a though the past, and the present have collided.
As in all of this author's novels, there is an incredible sense of place. Arbroath is vividly depicted; the cliffs, the sea, the small-town claustrophobia and unexpected warmth. You can almost feel the salt in the air and the weight of shared history pressing down on everyone. It’s a picture of a town that David once dismissed as small and stifling, only to discover that perhaps he hasn’t escaped it, or his own past, quite as successfully as he imagined.
There’s also a tenderness here beneath the dark humour and creeping dread. This is a story about guilt, about the stories we tell ourselves to survive, and about the uneasy business of growing up.
As debuts go, Tombstoning is remarkably assured. Reading it now, you can see the seeds of the bold ideas and emotional depth that characterise the author's more recent work. Gripping, intelligent and emotionally resonant, this is a novel that stands the test of time, and one I wholeheartedly recommend.
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The Space Between Us was chosen for BBC Two’s Between the Covers, while six of his books have been shortlisted or longlisted for the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year or the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Novel of the Year.
Doug has taught creative writing or been writer in residence at universities, schools, writing retreats, festivals, prisons and a funeral directors.
He’s also been an arts journalist for twenty-five years.
He is a songwriter and musician with ten albums released, and drummer for the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers.
He’s also co-founder of the Scotland Writers Football Club.
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