CALLUM
McSorley
Callum is a writer based in Glasgow whose short stories have been published in Gutter Magazine and New Writing Scotland and produced for BBC Radio 4. His debut novel, SQUEAKY CLEAN was published in 2023. With it, Callum became the youngest ever author to win the prestigious McIlvanney Prize for Best Scottish Crime Novel of the Year. His second novel, PAPERBOY, was one of The Sunday Times books of the year 2025, a finalist for the McIlvanney Prize and was longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award. The third part of the trilogy, RAT RACE, is out now and has won Callum a third nomination for the McIlvanney.
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Sindhu Rajasekaran (SR): I watch a lot of film noir. Haven’t read as much noir (although I think I’m getting more into it: recently read some Canadian noir – Kelley Armstrong’s Cold as Hell). It’s such a fascinating form to write and read. You are known to mix noir with humour, which isn’t always an easy thing to do, I imagine, in the same text. Tell me about what got you into writing crime fiction. What informs your style?
Callum McSorley (CM): I was always big into SF and fantasy growing up then had an extended beat gen phase in my late teens--normal. What really got me into crime fiction was a film called Brick. This is Rian Johnson’s (now of Star Wars Last Jedi fame/infamy) first film and stars a post-3rd Rock, pre-A-list superstar with dodgy tech connections Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a high school student who discovers the dead body of his ex-girlfriend and decides to find out what happened himself. However, despite being set in a modern-day high school, the style and dialogue is all in the style of a fifties hardboiled noir film – punchy, lyrical, poetic. Bags of style.
I was in love with it and sought out all the stuff Johnson said inspired him. That brought me to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet – the classics – and then onto contemporary writers like James Ellroy and Dennis Lehane. People who wrote with flare.
Then I read The Cutting Room by Louise Welsh and everything clicked into place. Here was Glasgow, as I knew it but also totally different. Welsh had created a Glasgow that had all the glamour and seediness of hardboiled LA. This is what I wanted to write.
When I think of humour in crime, I think of Chandler’s sarky Philip Marlowe and his fantastic turns of phrase, and I think of The Sopranos. As a student I worked in a car wash (which later became the setting of Squeaky Clean) and when it wasn’t busy, we watched our way through every season of The Sopranos. It has the perfect blend of humour and seriousness. The episode ‘Pine Barrens’ (directed by Steve Buscemi) is one of the show’s most beloved episodes for the reason that it nails this perfectly. “The guy was an interior decorator”/ “His house looked like shit” repeats in my head a lot.
That’s the line I wanted to walk. Grisly, hard, but also absurd.
SR: Your award-winning debut Squeaky Clean is set in Glasgow. A city I fondly think of as home (away from home). Definitely a great setting for tartan noir. I’m not sure I understand all the Glaswegian street slang, but I love to hear it. And your book teems with it. Your writing evokes an immediate sense of place, pulling the reader into the scene. Do you think about pacing when you write? Or do the characters determine it? I wonder what comes first to you – the language, the dialogue? Or the place, the characters, the plot?
CM: My books don’t really have much of the romantic idea of Scotland in them. It’s a rolling set of industrial estates and housing schemes with the occasional fancy neighbourhood thrown in. Beyond a few recognisable street names, what really lets the reader feel they’re in Glasgow is the dialogue. I wanted to capture the way people talk as best I could, even if that meant it might be tricky for some readers. What’s important is the sound and rhythm it creates. That’s style. You could standardise it, but you would be stripping that away and, with it, what makes the books special. I always say I don’t want to treat a reader like a tourist. I want them dropped straight in—they can pick it up as they go along.
These days I plan up front a lot more, meaning I can set the pace beforehand but otherwise a lot of that is down to editing, seeing where things sag and bloat, or where a bit of slack is actually needed. There’s a learning curve there that never ends.
Plot and character are intertwined. You need the right plot for a character and the right character for a plot. Each of these books started with a grain of an idea—how about a car wash that is taken over by gangsters? Or a guy who sells secrets he should be shredding because he’s got gambling debts? The last in the trilogy, Rat Race, was inspired by news headlines from back in 2020 during the lockdown—drug dealers posing as joggers to make their deliveries in parks. From there I can figure out a bit about the characters involved which leads to some plotting and back and forth till I have something like a story to tell.
SR: Squeaky Clean’s sequel Paper Boy was also nominated for several awards. I’ve never written a sequel. It’s an intimidating thought. Did Squeaky Clean’s success make you feel confident going into the sequel? What are some of the challenges that come with writing sequels?
CM: Yes and no. The success of Squeaky, and the McIlvanney win, gave me confidence but it also meant, inevitably, putting pressure on myself to one-up it. Come up with something better. Prove it wasn’t a fluke.
I’d never written a sequel to anything either. Think about musicians—when they do the second album after a strong debut, they have two choices. One: do something wildly different, if people like it, great, if they don’t, so be it, you’re taking an artistic risk, you’re being bold and creative. Two: try to recapture what people liked about the first album (whatever that is – who knows really?) running the huge risk that people will say ‘it’s just the same but not as good’. My instincts would be to go with number one, but I’d said I would do a sequel, so…
Ask yourself: how many sequels are better than the original? Godfather 2, Empire Strikes Back… the list isn’t long. That’s what you’re striving to make.
What I found is that having the same characters, settings, and voice to return to made the day-to-day work of writing relatively easy. The hard part is creating something using all these familiar things that feels fresh.
SR: Tell me a little about Alison McCoist. How did this character come about? She sounds super interesting; she has so much to deal with. Also, I admire spiky women, haha.
CM: Alison, or ‘Ally’ as she hates being called, came along near the end of the original draft of Squeaky Clean, which was a novella called Valet back then. Valet mostly dealt with unfortunate car washer Davey and his attempts to extricate himself from the criminal underworld which he has unwillingly been dragged into.
This is still the backbone of Squeaky Clean but when I came to expand it into a novel, the first thing I looked for was interesting characters who had more to give, and DI McCoist was top of the list.
McCoist isn’t the world’s greatest detective, nor is she the world’s greatest mum, despite owning mugs that make these claims. But she is driven and, at her core, brave. The things she gets herself into rightly terrify her but she does it anyway. Partly because of increasingly confused notions of justice and morality but also because she has a bit of a spiteful streak. When she first appears in Squeaky Clean she is in disgrace after bungling a case, and more than anything she wants to prove to everybody that she can still do the job, and do it better than they can.
SR: Onto to your latest book, Rat Race. In this one, Alison McCoist deals with corruption in her own ranks. I like this title, Rat Race. It sort of encapsulates my thoughts on a lot of things to do with society, work, and life in general. What’s the plot of this one?
CM: Rat Race is about Fran Forbes. At sixteen, he’s a very successful drug dealer. He asks the guy up the ladder for a big shipment of coke to punt and the man agrees. The deal is on. Unfortunately, it is March 2020 and as soon as Fran gets hold of the gear, the country is plunged into lockdown. Not stymied for long, Fran poses as a runner, using his allotted exercise time each day (remember that?) to run all over Glasgow, meeting people in parks to sell. Not only is he successful in this, but he falls in love with running and becomes so good at it that he goes pro and leaves his burgeoning life of crime behind.
Unfortunately for Fran, that’s just the prologue. Kicking off chapter 1, it’s 2026 and Fran needs a lot of money for an op on his knees. So he goes back to his old connection, who is now top dog in the Glasgow underworld and agrees to one last job. As these things tend to do in crime fiction, it all goes very well…
Meanwhile McCoist is finally being investigated by anti-corruption and is being pressured into flipping on her boss, a powerful Machiavellian schemer who secretly pulls all the strings.
SR: Finally, what’s next?
CM: Next year I’m doing something a little different. Not to say too much at this stage, it’s historical crime, set in the 1890s and not in Scotland. I also have a couple of short stories coming out that I’m really excited about!
Thanks very much!