Ed James: Fear of Any Kind

Ed James has amassed over 2.5m sales since 2012 in a prolific writing career.

Ed is one of the few writers today focusing attention on the Borders, which he has placed firmly on the Tartan Noir map with his books proving highly popular in the Borders and further afield. 2024’s His Path of Darkness borrowed heavily from one of the region’s greatest literary moments: James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (which celebrated its 200th anniversary last year) and the book opens with a murder of a young woman in the disused Neidpath railway tunnel near Peebles, with events unfolding around the town’s cultural touchstones, such as Beltane.

His latest DI Rob Marshall novel, Fear of Any Kind, takes its title from John Buchan’s Greenmantle and centres around Hawick, where the community is decimated by the murder of a teenage boy near the town’s museum. The next novel, Our Debts to the Past, picks up an unsolved murder from 2000 at Scott’s View – the book’s title, taken from John Buchan’s Address to the People of Canada on the Coronation of George VI on May 12, 1937, explores the theme of emigration to that nation across the Atlantic, as well as the people who choose to stay.

Ed has long admired John Buchan’s work for its deep sense of place, moral complexity and thrilling narrative drive. Since reading The Thirty-Nine Steps as a lad, a book he’s often returned to, Buchan’s ability to fuse the political with the personal has been a major influence on Ed’s own writing – and that novel provided a template for so many thrillers that came after it. Like Buchan, Ed sees rural Scotland not just as a backdrop but as a living, breathing character in its own right.