Inspiration for FROM THE SHADOWS and DI Monica Kennedy series
My DI Monica Kennedy novels grew out of a dark question on a Sunday walk on the Highland coast, ‘what would it feel like to be walking through this beautiful landscape and come across a dead body?’
Someone murdered and left in a particular position. What kind of person might have done it? What darkness had brought them here? And who would be the detective tasked with finding the answers?
In a sense From The Shadows, and the books that followed it, come from that collision between the magical Highland landscapes and the horror of crimes committed in such a place. The Highlands are often presented as romantic, timeless and beautiful, and they certainly are those things. But there’s also isolation, distance and vast empty spaces where people can disappear, and horrible things can be buried.
I was born in Edinburgh and grew up in Central Scotland. From my bedroom window I could just make out the first mountains of the Highlands in the distance. They held a kind of romantic fascination for me. At weekends, my friends and I would head off into the hills to explore, camp and listen to 1990s rave music surrounded by mountains and woodland. The landscapes captured my imagination before I really believed I could become a writer.
My love of mountains and wild places eventually led me to move north after university. Exploring these extraordinary locations became a huge part of my life and, eventually, the backdrop for the Monica Kennedy novels and The Dark television series based on them. Many of the landscapes in the books are places I’ve walked through, climbed over or driven past. The challenge was to capture not only their beauty but also the unique and haunting atmosphere that makes the Highlands so special to me.
While I was fascinated by distant mountains as a child, I was equally fascinated by, and terrified of, ‘Unexplained Mysteries.’
My father, Ron Halliday, is a well-known paranormal investigator and author, so our house was always filled with books about ghosts, unsolved murders and mysterious disappearances. Because these books said “non-fiction” on the back, my young mind assumed that meant every word of them was true. I grew up in a world populated by hauntings, missing persons and murderous strangers lurking just beyond the edge of ordinary life.
It was frightening, but it was also far more interesting to me than exams, careers advice or the everyday concerns of school life…
This backdrop had an unexpected consequence when I eventually discovered crime fiction. Books that were described as terrifying or deeply disturbing often didn’t strike me that way at all. I loved the mysteries, the investigations and the characters, but I often found myself thinking that they would have to be considerably darker to match the world that had already been created in my imagination.
When I eventually sat down to write From The Shadows, I wanted to try to bring some of that atmosphere to the page.
What became the opening of the novel, and eventually the opening episode of The Dark, came directly from those interests and obsessions, mountain landscapes, hidden dangers and the unsettling feeling that beneath ordinary life there are darker stories waiting to be uncovered.
The other major influence on the Monica Kennedy books was Scandinavian crime fiction.
My family, and especially my partner Sarah, are huge fans of Scandinavian writers and television dramas, which gradually drew me into that world as well. I loved the complexity of the characters, the moral ambiguity and the willingness of those stories to explore genuinely dark territory. The television series and novels often felt cinematic, ambitious and emotionally honest in ways that stayed with me long after I had finished them.
I found myself wondering whether it might be possible to create something similar. Stories that blended mystery, suspense and adventure with complex characters and a strong sense of place, all set against the backdrop of the Highlands and their unique layers of history, culture and landscape.
Someone once described Monica Kennedy as a blend of Saga from ‘The Bridge’ and Sherlock Holmes, which I rather liked.
The final important influence on From The Shadows came from a brief period in 2004, shortly after I had completed a degree in Ancient History and was working temporary jobs while deciding what to do next.
For a short time I worked in a Child Protection department and was struck by the immense difficulty of the work the social workers were doing. Trying, often with limited resources, to hold back tides of chaos and make decisions that could have life-changing or even life-or-death consequences for the people involved.
That experience stayed with me for years and eventually informed one of the novel’s central characters, Michael Bach, a social worker who becomes involved in the search for one of his missing teenage clients while DI Monica Kennedy investigates the murders of adolescent boys across the Highlands.
Looking back now, the origins of From The Shadows seem to have emerged from that blend, a fascination with mountains and wild landscapes, a childhood immersed in mysteries and the unexplained, a love of dark Scandinavian crime fiction and an admiration for people doing difficult jobs under impossible circumstances.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, Monica Kennedy just appeared and gradually took over!
From the Shadows is publlshed by Point Blanks
