Doug Johnstone

Italian friends! I am coming to your fine country soon to celebrate the publication of Colpisci E Scappa by local heroes CasaSirio. Look, here are my tour dates. Looking forward to catching up with old friends and hopefully new readers. Bella!

Hello American friends! My eighth novel, Crash Land, is published in your glorious land of the free today. Pop into your local bookstore or get it online here. It’ll help distract you from the ongoing catastrofuck of your politics right now, I promise.

I love islands. I love islands so much I’ve now written three novels set on them, and some short stories. Here is something I wrote for The Royal Literary Fund about how much I love islands.

So our band is playing our first ever show! The Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers will be rocking out at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Wed 23rd Aug, 9pm in the Spiegeltent. It’s part of the festival’s terrific Unbound programme, free cabaret events every night. We are not cabaret though, we are fucking rawk! And some acoustic stuff, likes. Anyway, it’ll be a hoot. Here is a daft preview of it in The Skinny.

Dx

I have a signed and personalised book for auction over at the wonderful Authors for Grenfell Tower site. There loads of great stuff on offer from hundreds of amazing writers, so do have a browse.

So I’m in a band. Back to drumming for the first time in donkey’s years. It’s a ‘supergroup’ of sorts, made up of crime writers, playing a set of crime-related tunes. Here we are:

Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers: Stuart Neville, Luca Veste, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham, Doug Johnstone, Chris Brookmyre

We rehearsed for the first time the other day, and it wasn’t too shabby. We have a top secret gig coming in Edinburgh in August, then we’re playing at Bloody Scotland in September.

Here are a couple of snaps:

So the Edinburgh International Book Festival launched their 2017 programme the other day in town, and I have a cheeky wee event, with English author, poet and playwright Barney Norris on Friday 25th August at 2pm. A bit of blurb about it is here. There’s also, you know, a thousand other authors over two weeks in a beautiful location in central Edinburgh in the middle of the festival. So, all in all, good times.

I’m delighted to have a short story in this fine collection, due out in September. Dx

Absolutely thrilled to have this wee book out in the world, from my time as writer in residence at William Purves Funeral Directors last year. Lovely to see so many familiar faces at the launch tonight, at the company’s annual gathering. Good people doing good work. I hope the book does them justice.

I was up early this morning to go and get my picture taken in Stirling Castle along with a bunch of other crime writers and organisers of Bloody Scotland, which launched today.

I’ve just realised looking through the programme that I’m involved in SEVEN different events. How the hell did that happen? My events are:

Crime Writing Masterclass

Gala Opening including launch of Bloody Scotland short story anthology

Playing drums for the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers after the quiz

Bloody Scotland football match

Crime at the Coo

Bloody India: Abir Mukherjee, Monabi Mitra, Doug Johnstone and Lin Anderson

Building Plots: Bloody Scotland – Louise Welsh, Doug Johnstone and E.S. Thomson

Check out the whole programme here – loads of fantastic events over the weekend.

Dx