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We're standing on the dead - a jagged path of headstones leading to the front door of St Nicholas Church in Aberdeen. When Stuart MacBride first came to this place as a boy, his dad would freak him out by telling him he was walking on dead people, which is the kind of dark thought that can stick in a young boy's brain. It might explain why MacBride grew up to write the sort of novels he's famous for - novels in which dead bodies play a starring role.
The first of those novels, Cold Granite, was published in 2005 and sent MacBride straight into the top three or four of Scottish crime writers, although it also attracted criticism and disgust from some. Many were turned off by the violence and blood and bad language; others were turned on by his gift for a one- liner and dialogue that sounded like it was real.
Today MacBride, 43, has taken me to St Nicholas Church as part of a tour of the places that inspired Cold Granite, and the 10 novels that have followed, including his new one, Close to the Bone. He calls the kirkyard a doom-laden place and I can see what he means - not only are we standing on a path made up of the mourned and the forgotten, we're also surrounded on all sides by great walls of granite - and on a cold day like this, the granite glowers.
Over the years, this grey churchyard has featured in several of MacBride's books as a place to run, or hide, or think. MacBride was four years old when he was first taken here, two years after moving from Clydebank to Aberdeen. He's never lived anywhere else since and loves the place, although it took him a while to work out the city would be a good location for a modern crime novel.
"I first thought of setting it in either Glasgow or Edinburgh, which everybody does, and then I thought: Why not Aberdeen?" he says. "Scotland is only now starting to get over this whole thing where you have to be in Glasgow or Edinburgh to write crime fiction. Scotland is starting to come alive with different people writing different stories."