Ringwood author Rob McInroy comes back on the podcast in this episode to discuss the release of his latest novel, Moot, the third book in the award-winning Bob Kelty series of the historical crime fiction genre. He speaks on writing about his hometown of Crieff, in Perthshire, where Moot is set, the unique character of former detective Bob Kelty, the representation of the Traveller community in the novel, his future plans for the series, and more!
Moot will be launched on 26 May at Strathearn Arts at 4pm in Crieff. The event is free and all are welcome to attend.
Check out Rob's website here to learn more about him and his writing.
You can order Moot here.
If you haven't had a chance to read the first two books in the Bob Kelty series, Cuddies Strip or Barossa Street, be sure to check them out, too!
Ringwood author Rob McInroy comes back on the podcast in this episode to discuss the release of his latest novel, Moot, the third book in the award-winning Bob Kelty series of the historical crime fiction genre. He speaks on writing about his hometown of Crieff, in Perthshire, where Moot is set, the unique character of former detective Bob Kelty, the representation of the Traveller community in the novel, his future plans for the series, and more!
Moot will be launched on 26 May at Strathearn Arts at 4pm in Crieff. The event is free and all are welcome to attend.
Check out Rob's website here to learn more about him and his writing.
You can order Moot here.
If you haven't had a chance to read the first two books in the Bob Kelty series, Cuddies Strip or Barossa Street, be sure to check them out, too!
Júlia: Welcome to the Ringwood Publishing Podcast. I'm your host, Júlia.
Annemarie: And I'm your host, Annemarie. And each week, we are joined by a series of authors, colleagues, and guests to talk about all things books and publishing.
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Júlia: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Season 3, Episode 4 of the Ringwood Publishing Podcast. My name is Júlia Pujals Antolin, and I'll be one of the co-hosts for this season, along with fellow intern, Annemarie Whitehurst.
Annemarie: Hello.
Júlia: For our fourth episode of the season, we’ve invited Ringwood author Rob McInroy to discuss the release of his latest novel, Moot,
the third book in the award-winning Bob Kelty series of the historical fiction
genre.
Annemarie: Rob McInroy was born in Crieff, Perthshire. His writing is firmly rooted in the Perthshire area, spanning its history from the 1920s to the 2010s. His first two books in the Bob Kelty series, Cuddies Strip and Barossa Street, were published by Ringwood in 2020 and 2022. He is the previous winner of four short story competitions (Hissac, ChipLit Fest, Writing Magazine and the Bedford International Writing Competition), and has been shortlisted for a further sixteen. In 2018 he was a winner of the Bradford Literature Festival Northern Noir Crime Novel competition with Cuddies Strip and this novel was subsequently long-listed for the Crime Writers Association John Creasey First Blood Dagger Award. In 2019, he won the Darling Axe Novel First Page Prize for his novel Cloudland. He lives in Yorkshire.
The third book in the series, Moot, takes place during July 1939, when 3500 young men from around the world arrive at Monzie Castle in Perthshire for the third international Rover Scout Moot. In the shadow of looming war, the moot seems to be a last gasp of international friendship and fraternity. But among them is a murderer.
Bob Kelty discovers a dead body in a burnt-out tent on the edge of the camp. He is immediately suspicious but for some reason the authorities seem reluctant to become involved. More strange things begin to happen and Bob’s suspicions increase. And if the authorities won’t look into them, Bob decides he must.
Moot is a novel of manipulation and trickery, murder and conspiracy. Unwittingly, Bob gets drawn deeper and deeper into events he does not understand and cannot control, events which reach to the highest areas of government.
And the question is: when is a murder not a murder?
Apart from being a novelist and a short story writer, Rob has taught creative writing. He has an MA with distinction in Creative Writing and a PhD in American Literature, both from the University of Hull. He's also one of the judges in the annual Ringwood short story competition.
Júlia: Thank you so much, Rob, for joining us in this episode. This is your second appearance on the Ringwood Podcast, and we're so happy that you’re back this season.
In the previous episode that you were in, you spoke a lot about your writing and research process, and why you chose to set your first few stories during the era leading up to World War 2, as well as tips on writing historical fiction and short stories. This time around, we really want to get into the story of Moot, your upcoming novel, and the Bob Kelty series to give readers a little bit of a taste into what they would be immersing themselves into when picking up the book.
So, Annemarie, do you want to start with the questions?
Annemarie: Sure. Your first two novels, Cuddies Strip and Barossa Street are set in Perth. And now Moot is set not too far away, just a stone's throw away in Crieff in Scotland. And you spoke in your last podcast appearance about the extensive research you did for the stories. Being from this area, could you talk about what it's like writing about your home? Especially since you have to merge your personal knowledge and experience with historical events.
Rob: When I made the move from writing short stories to writing novels, I also made the decision that I was going to write solely about Perthshire. I don't really know why I did that, I just did. But the difficulty I had was that I've lived in England since 1987. And Scotland is a very different place now from when it was when I last lived there. So, I can write about the geography of Crieff and the history of it, but the modern town is much bigger than it was when I lived there and I suspect it's a very different place. So, I made the decision that I was going to write in the past. And the first novel I wrote – which hasn't been published yet – was the first of a planned trilogy set in Crieff and Perth, and I set it in 1985. But I still lived there because I felt comfortable writing about that period.
But then, of course, I came across the true story behind Cuddies Strip, my first published novel, and that centers on crimes in Perth in 1935. And that was really fascinating to me. So, I abandoned the 1980s series that I was writing and concentrated on that. So now, I'm working my way through the years from 1935 to 1985, when the two series will merge.
So, the first two books are set in Perth. But it was always my intention to shift the location to Crieff. Crieff’s my hometown. I'm Crieff born and bred. And I'm very fond of the place and its people. So, I do enjoy writing about it and reading about it. And I think probably everyone's a little bit about, like this. It’s like when you see your home town on a TV program. And as it happens, Crieff was on Escape to the Country on BBC two days ago. And I was shouting at the screen, you know, ‘That's James Square! ‘That's Kings Street!’ ‘That's where the launch event is taking place!’
So, you get this sense of connection. And I'm sure that anyone who's familiar with the layout of Crieff or its history, will find that interesting in Moot. So, apart from the story itself, I think the background and the setting can become really important. And I think going back to what I said about, ‘I don't know why I write about Perthshire’. I think that is it. I think this because I think there is that real connection.
Júlia: Yeah, no, that makes sense.
Annemarie: Are there any particular places that you included in either Moot or either Cuddies Strip or Barossa Street that you really personally love? And you're like, ‘Oh, I have to include it in these stories’?
Rob: Yeah, there's a place in Crieff called ‘Lady Mary's Walk’. And it's a walk just along the side of the River Earn, which goes through Crieff. And it's a lovely walk. It was given to the people of Crieff by Lady Mary Drummond, which is why it's called ‘Lady Mary’s Walk’. It's a really lovely walk. And there's a beach there, which I used to play as a kid. There was a huge boulder, some sort of prehistoric boulder, it's just on that beach. And we used to play on that all the time, people used to have fires there.
And round the corner, up the back from Lady Mary’s Walk, there was an old burnt-out house. It burned down in the 60s. It was just an accident. It was just a fire. Absolutely the middle of nowhere, so there's no way a fire brigade was ever going to get to it. But obviously, in my fairytale imagination as a writer, I was inventing all of these things about this house, things that could have happened. And so that has featured – it will feature in the next book that will come out. That's a feature in there.
So yes, I do that quite a lot.
Annemarie: That's awesome. That's so cool. Your main character, Bob Kelty, he has a very complicated relationship with law enforcement and the authorities. And for those who haven't read Cuddies Strip and Barossa Street, could you, Rob, briefly describe his background, and then touch upon your inspiration for his character?
Rob: Well, in the first book, Cuddies Strip, as I said, it's set in 1935. So Bob is 20-21 years old. And he's working in the police, but not really through choice. He's lived with his Gran, in Perth, since he was 12 and he's a very nervous young man. He’s lacking in self-confidence and is not at all practical. And, frankly, he’s totally unsuited to being a police officer. But his Gran worked for a couple called the Conoboys, Bella and Victor Conoboy. And Victor was a police inspector. So he got Bob the job in the police. Bob didn't want it, but he didn't feel able to say no. So he's this very reluctant police officer.
And then through the course of the investigation in Cuddies Strip, he grows increasingly disenchanted with the police force, and with authority in general, which he feels is kind of fueled by self-interest and doesn't take into view, into account, the views of ordinary people like him. And so, this feeling, this sense of alienation from authority, will grow in each succeeding book. It becomes a major theme in the series.
So, the inspiration for Bob, his character is actually a fusion of two separate characters I had already written about. I decided when I was planning Cuddies Strip that I wanted my main character to be very young and not very good at what he does. In most crime fiction, there's this kind of cult of competence. The detectives always have to be really good at everything, except relationships. And I wanted it to be the other way around.
So, in the series I was writing about – the one that was set in the 1980s that I abandoned – I had this character who ran a cafe in Crieff called ‘Cloudland’. And that was the central location for the novel. So this character, he was in his 70s. And he wasn't the main character in the book – that was a young American woman, 19 year old American woman – but he was, like, the moral center of the story. He was the one who holds all together this, this cast of dissolute and disreputable characters who frequent his cafe. And thinking about it, when I was planning for Cuddies Strip, I had this realization that the ages worked. This guy, he was in his 70s in the 1980s. So, he'd be in his 20s in 1935, the same age as Bob Kelty. So this character could be Bob grown old, with a serenity and a confidence that he never had as a younger man. So now I had this prospect of a whole series of books and 50 years to figure out how he managed to become that older man. And that was quite an exciting prospect.
And then the second character is based on this one that I wrote about in a short story that's published in New Writing Scotland. And it’s a, it’s a coming-of-age story about a young boy, twelve-years-old, in rural Perthshire in the 1920s. And this boy is very shy, lacking in confidence, so it's exactly like Bob. And again, the timing fitted. So that young boy became Bob Kelty. And that was really good, because it meant that now I had an already-made backstory, from the tragic events that happened in the short story, to take, to take into the new series.
Annemarie: That's so neat how, because your characters’ personalities have similarities, you could work either backwards or forwards to find that sweet spot to the current character of Bob Kelty. That's so neat.
Júlia: Bob Kelty is not your typical, knows-exactly-what-he's-getting-into, super intelligent detective. And I think that definitely, you can see that in the way that the novel is writing. Because one thing I found really interesting was how the narration was focused through different characters. Because you've got, you pay attention to Bob Kelty and how his inner mind works, but you also pay attention to Annie’s own doings and going arounds. It's not something that I see in a lot of crime fiction novels, where the narrator usually only follows the mind of the main detective. What made you choose this approach?
Rob: Well, I guess there's quite a filmic quality to my writing. I tend to write a lot of short scenes, like you're get in a TV production, and jump cuts, and so on. And I think this switching of voices is something you see much more in TV dramas than you do in written fiction. So, it may be that that's where it comes from. The thing with Bob is that he doesn't actually know himself very well. So sometimes I have to take it out of his point of view, to get something across because he can't actually see it himself.
And I do like taking the viewpoint of the antagonists because it allows me to make them more real. In classic whodunnit, straight whodunnit, you never really get this. You never get to know the characters very well, because the author can't give too much away about them or the reader will guess who did it. And as a result, they can be a bit cardboardy, two-dimensional. Why did they commit that murder? Well, because it was the only person the reader wouldn't suspect. And so for me that can create a bit of a credibility deficit. So in Cuddies Strip and in Moot, you know who the culprit is from the start. And that allows me, hopefully, to build their characters and give some motivation for what they do. That’s motivation in their eyes. We may not agree with that motivation, but at least we know what it is, and why they think it justifies what they do. So, it just makes it more real for me. I think that's why I do that.
Annemarie: I like your comparison to television. That makes a lot of sense. Because often in TV, you know who the bad guy is and you're waiting for the good guy to catch up on their motivation and their reasoning.
Júlia: Yeah, even if they don't show you the face of a person, they always show you, like, a hand or, like, an action they're doing, and you’re just sort of, like, waiting for the two events to connect.
Rob: Yeah.
Júlia: Um, but, yeah. There's actually, like, a lot of characters in Moot and, of course, in your other stories. The event of 1939, the Rover Scout Moot, which saw 3,500 young men from 48 countries arrived to the rural Monzie Estate provides a great opportunity for representation and diversity in your story. And you also don't forget to touch upon diversity within Scotland, which shines a light on the discrimination that- and societal tensions that Travellers faced. So, what was your inspiration for writing this representation? And was it based on any particular research or some personal experiences?
Rob: I did want to write about Travellers, the Traveller community. When she was a child in the 1930s, my mother used to play with Traveller children, one particular Traveller girl, and she'd get into terrible trouble for it when she got home. Basically, she'd get belted by her father for it. And that was just fairly typical of the way that people thought and behaved at the time.
There was always a lot of tension between the Traveller people and the ‘country hanto’, which is what you call non-Travellers, and there's no question that Travellers got discriminated against, and they always have been. But it started getting more and more difficult for them from the 1930s onwards. There was a woman called Betsy Whyte, she was a Traveller. And she wrote a classic memoir, absolutely brilliant book called The Yellow on the Broom, about her early life. So she was born in 1919 and the book covers her childhood and early years. So largely, it's the 1920s-1930s. And she wrote that, in the 1930s, the Travellers began to see everywhere, signs that said, ‘No tinkers’ and ‘Tinkers not allowed’. And this was in places where they'd always been previously perfectly welcome. She didn't really know why this was happening. But there was just a shift in the relationship, and I don't think it ever really recovered. So, travelers tended to get blamed for everything, and they weren't treated very well at all.
And I think it's a real shame that that entire Traveller way of life has, more or less, died out in my lifetime. I can distinctly remember back in the 1970s, the tatty howkin time, the potato picking time. Every year, the meadows in Crieff, in central Crieff, would just be taken over by the Travellers in their caravans and vans, they would all come in to Crieff to do the tatty howkin. And they'd be there for a couple of weeks doing that. And then they'd all disperse again and go their separate ways all around Scotland. So it was a life they spent entirely on the road. They didn't have houses, they lived entirely on the road. And as I say, that's gone now, completely gone. I feel really lucky to have seen that and experienced that. But I think it's such a shame that that entire way of life has just disappeared. So, I wanted to touch on the Traveller, the Traveller experience in the book.
Júlia: That makes sense, because I feel like with those characters in the book, you also touch a lot on land privatization and the way that landowners choose who gets to go on their lands and not. I remember, like, my dad, he used to live on a farm when he was younger and they didn't own the land, they just would take care of the farm. But the landowner didn't want many Travellers coming in, setting up their tents, they had to go in and, sort of, manage that. Which is such a, such a hard position to put people in. But it was really interesting to read about it in the Scottish context. Definitely.
Rob: Yeah. I mean, it got to this stage where they had, there was no place they could go because they were turfed out everywhere they went, they got, moved on. And so, they just literally had no place to go.
Annemarie: I think that, in Moot, you do a really good job of mirroring the, the wider event, the upcoming World War 2: Nazi Germany versus the rest of the world. And, and then you have Scotland. At times, you know, Bob Kelty says like, ‘Oh, we're kind of removed from this conflict, we feel really removed, but it's, it's coming. You know, it's going to come to Scotland eventually, but we don't quite feel it.’ And because of the moot you have characters who are feeling it currently, who feel the pressure of Nazi Germany, and I think you do a good job of mirroring that kind of grander scale to the conflict that the Travellers face against, like, the authorities and police investigation. So yeah, I really love that.
Kind of a big question: I loved your title. The readers can really grasp it by the end of the story, um, it has a very distinct double meaning, and I really wanted to touch upon it during the podcast. Would you be able to speak to its thematic resonance, especially to, not just its definition, but the historical setting, this period before World War 2?
Rob: Yeah, there's, there's a couple of epigraphs at the start of the book, one is from Winston Churchill. And he says, ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that it should always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.’ And R.A. Butler, Rob Butler, he said, ‘Good government flourishes in the dark.’ Now those are two highly problematic statements for me. And that's what the novel explores. That's what it's about. There is a secrecy about government, and the things that they do, and that hasn't changed. We don't really know what goes on in our name: decisions are made and things happen, that we've got no say in, no knowledge of, no means of influencing.
And of course, in the late 1930s, when I'm writing about, with the country on the verge of war, that becomes almost total. Essentially overnight and the declaration of war, Britain became a dictatorship: no elections; compulsory registration in a national register identity cards; conscription of men, later on women as well; internment of foreign nationals; property compulsorily requisitioned by the military; enforced blackout. They could do basically whatever they wanted.
So, you're right. And actually, there's probably about five different meanings of ‘moot’ explored in the novel. So, at a basic level, a ‘Moot’, capital ‘m’, is a scout camp, specifically one for older scouts, Rover Scouts, aged 18 to 24. And the International Rover Scout Moot in the grounds of Monzie Castle in July 1939 that really did happen. That forms the backdrop to the novel. And a ‘moot’ with a lowercase ‘m’ is also a meeting place, especially one on a hill. So, Michaels Nook, which is a key location in the novel, that's basically a moot within the Moot. But the word also has different meanings as well. So, a ‘moot point’ is something that's open to question or debatable or uncertain. And linked to that, it may mean something that's got little or no practical relevance, typically, because the subject is too uncertain to allow anyone to make a sensible decision about it. So, if you say something's ‘moot’, you're effectively saying there's no point in debating it. And then, a further meeting – eh, meaning – is in a noun form, when you have a ‘moot court’. And this where you have a mock judicial proceedings, set up to examine some kind of hypothetical case as an academic exercise. And normally, that's a perfectly positive thing. It's a very, done for valid reasons, it’s part of training and development. In Moot, it isn't. And this is what awaits Bob Kelty in the novel. So, so those are the meanings of the word ‘moot’ that the novel explores. And the tagline for the novel is: ‘When is a murder not a murder?’ And of course, the answer is: moot.
Annemarie: Great.
Júlia: You do add, like, author's notes and publisher’s notes in the novel to, sort of, like, guide the reader in the words that you use. Did you ever consider adding a definition at the beginning of the novel of the different meanings of ‘moot’? Or did you really want to let the reader figure that out for themselves?
Rob: Yeah, I wanted to let them figure it out. And actually, within the text of the novel, there’s about, there’s two, certainly, I think there might be three places where, actually, what I've written is more or less as a standard dictionary definition of ‘moot’. I don't necessarily say it, but it is. So, I wanted to just try and leave it for the readers to, to work it out.
Júlia: Definitely makes the reading a lot more interesting. You’ve touched briefly on the future novel that you're working on in this, sort of, universe. Do you have any sneak peeks? Or details about what they might be about?
Rob: Yep, I do. So as I said, I'll be taking Bob Kelty through all of the years into the 1980s. Moot, that ends in July 1939, so it's just before the outbreak of World War 2. The next book is already written, it's called ‘Barvic Falls’. And it begins on the day that war is declared. And again, in this one, you know, from the start who the antagonist is. So we're introduced to a psychopathic woman, called Laurna Carrington. And the actions of all the other characters in the novel will decide whether or not she gets away with her plans. So that will be the next one.
And one after that, I'm currently writing that, I’m at 50,000 words into that one now. It's set in 1940. And Bob has received his call up papers for the war. Now, given his antipathy towards authority, that's always going to be quite problematic for him. So, this novel, which will be called North Inch, explores ideas of duty and nationalism and pacifism.
And then, there will be future books as well. They will see the introduction of some of Scotland's most famous writers and poets, so you can expect some good quality flyting in those, traditional Scottish flyting. And I'm a lot more vague about the plot of some of those at the moment, but we can be fairly sure that whatever happens in it, Bob will still be fighting in some way against authority. So that, and that, hopefully will take us up to the 1980s.
Annemarie: Do you intend on having each book focus around crime?
Rob: I’m, I'm thinking about that because, and it’s difficult. I don't know. I'd actually quite like your views on this. Because once you started on a crime series, your readers are expecting it to be crime novels. And if at some point, it's not a crime novel, I don't know how the readers will react, respond to that. But I have given that quite a lot of thought, because obviously Crieff is a small place, and I don't want it to turn into Midsomer Murders where every second person gets killed, but, but it's able to run through 50 years of crime stories, we’re going to get to that stage.
So, I have thought about that quite a lot. And I'm not sure what the answer to that is yet.
Annemarie: Yeah, I definitely think it's a hard, it's a hard answer. I think too, though, that, you know, you have three books now with Bob Kelty, so, and plenty more coming. Your readers have, will have developed a relationship with him, will understand him, will understand his life, his viewpoints. So, at that point, once you, you know, the crime is the, kind of, ancillary part to understanding the characters around it, you know, so once you have that connection between your readers and, and your main character, I think you can definitely, you know, divert from the crime, yeah, genre. So, it's a hard question though.
Alright, well, thank you so much for being on the podcast with us today. This was really great.
Rob: Yeah, I’ve enjoyed it very much. Thank you very much.
Annemarie: Perfect, and congratulations on the upcoming launch of Moot.
Rob: Thank you. The book is getting launched on Sunday, Sunday the 26th, 4 o'clock in Strathearn Arts in Crieff. Everybody welcome, free, free event. So, do come along to that. If you want there are tickets for it, although it is free, but you can get tickets for it. If you want to do that, if you go to my website, so robmcinroy.co.uk and go to the, the news page. There's a link on there to how you get tickets.
Júlia: Preorder Moot before its launch on the 26th of May to get your copy for the discounted rate of £9.99. You can order Moot, as well as the first two books in the Bob Kelty series, Cuddies Strip and Barossa Street, through the Ringwood website if you're in the UK, or through Amazon if you're listening from abroad.
Annemarie: Thank you for listening!
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