Ones to watch in 2026: Allan Gaw, author
Allan Gaw’s crime novels have a fascinating lead in pathologist Jack Cuthbert, writes David Robinson
Allan Gaw never intended to be a crime novelist, even though his first book was voted 2024’s Scottish crime debut of the year. Ask him who his favourite crime writer is and he struggles to answer: “To tell the truth,” he confesses, “I don’t read a lot of it.”
He only started writing novels as he approached retirement after a distinguished career as a pathologist, in the course of which he studied under Nobel prize-winning scientists in Dallas, was in charge of research facilities in Glasgow and Belfast, wrote 25 mainly medical textbooks and published over 200 articles.
When it came to fiction, though, he wanted to put all that behind him. There wasn’t going to be a Scottish version of medical examiner Kay Scarpetta solving crime through forensics in Patricia Cornwell’s multi-million-selling series – even though Allan Gaw MD PhD FRCPath FFPM PGCertMedEd would be vastly more qualified to write one.
“What I really wanted to do,” he says, “was to write a story about character. I also wanted to get away from the contemporary world with mobile phones and all that. And from a forensic pathology point of view, I didn’t want to write a book with DNA in it. I wanted to get back to a slightly more old-school pathology.”
It took some time before all of that materialised in the form of 1920s pathologist Jack Cuthbert. Before it did, he wrote a number of short stories and four novels – love stories, mostly – set in the present and all now consigned to the bottom drawer at his Cumbernauld home. But Jack Cuthbert seemed to hang around, to intrigue him. He had, for example, been through the First World War, and its horrors had marked him. But how? And when two corpses were found in a London park in 1929, did what Cuthbert underwent at Ypres in any way help him solve the mystery of their deaths?
That, at least, was the subject of Gaw’s first novel, The Silent House of Sleep. And if latching onto a fascinating fictional character kickstarted his writing career, so too did joining the Strathkelvin Writers Group. “I went along with some trepidation,” he says, “but it was one of those places where you walk in, meet the people and you suddenly feel as though you’ve just come home.” Winning one of their competitions with the first chapter of his novel couldn’t have done any harm either.
At first, though, publishers weren’t interested, and it was only when The Silent House of Sleep became the first self-published novel to win a prize at 2024’s Bloody Scotland crime writing festival that Polygon signed him up on a four-book deal. Cuthbert, said BBC Scotland Arts Correspondent Pauline McLean – one of the judges – was “a brilliant, damaged genius you’ll want to follow to hell and back”. Collectively, the judging panel remarked that “the only thing that’s not believable is that this could be a debut novel”.
“I never intended to write a series,” says Gaw, “but by the end, I’d become so interested in the characters – not just Cuthbert – and I thought there was a lot more to say about them. Cuthbert is a complicated, interesting, layered character. At the start, you won’t know everything about him, but as onion skins are peeled back, you’ll find out more and more.
“For example, in the opening scene of the first book, he is in the courtroom giving expert testimony at the Old Bailey, and you might well think he is quite arrogant. But in the same chapter, we see him slumped behind the door in tears because of his PTSD, and we realise there’s more to him than we might have thought.”
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Not everyone, he admits, shares his love of backstory. “There’ll be some crime aficionados who think it’s just dithering,” he says, “who’ll wonder why I’m telling these backstories and who just want to get on with solving murders. A lot of people have liked the books, but you do get some odd responses. Someone once said to me they’d skipped the First World War stuff because they didn’t like reading about war. And someone else said they didn’t read the pathology stuff because it was too squelchy.”
It is indeed true that Gaw writes more about his protagonist’s backstory than is usual in crime fiction. In the fourth book in the series (The Shadows and the Dust, published this week) for example, there are whole chapters on Cuthbert’s childhood and adolescence that do not particularly advance the progress of the child murder cases he is investigating as a 37-year-old in 1931, even though they do offer parallels and insights along the way.
Personally, I have no problem with any of that, not least because Gaw takes time to get the historical backcloth right as well as filling in his characters’ backstories. He loves researching the 1920s and 1930s, not least because this was when pathology was becoming a science, but one that still relied on observation and knowledge rather than the slam-dunk of DNA evidence. Cuthbert, he says, will fit into that story too, and Gaw takes care to surround him with real-life pioneering pathologists and only ever to allow him access to the science available at the time. It is a potent mix, and as his publisher, Polygon, has just signed up for another three books in the series, Dr Jack Cuthbert will be around for a long while yet.
The Shadows and the Dust by Allan Gaw is published by Polygon on 8 January, price £9.99
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