With the Inkshares Mystery & Thriller contest nearing conclusion, I’ve went into marketing overdrive. Flyers have been distributed to bookshops, posters stuck up libraries and emails send to all and sundry. The local newspaper back in my home town are even running an article on The Unforgiven Dead. I know, fame at last! 

More exciting -  if that’s possible - is that I’ve almost completed the first draft of the second book in the Angus Dubh series. Entitled ’Shame the Devil’, it centres around the murder of a bookseller in what appears to by a vigilante attack.  However, Angus suspects the motive for the killing is something more sinister, revolving around an ancient manuscript said to have been written by the devil himself.

A book written by the devil? Ridiculous! Well... maybe not. Delving into the history of the West Highlands, I found reference to a tome known as ’The Red Book of Appin’, which was - you guessed it - the work of the devil.

(Appin, incidentally, is a wee village where, in 1752, Colin Campbell of Glenure was shot dead. The murder in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion led to one of Scotland’s most infamous miscarriages of justice when James Stewart - ’James of the Glens’ - was convicted and hanged for the crime. The incident inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Kidnapped).

The Red Book of Appin - so the story goes - was acquired by an orphan boy, who tricked the devil into handing over the book, which he took home to an old shepherd from Appin who cared for him. The story was recorded by folklorist JF Campbell in his Popular Tales of the West Highlands, published in 1860. 

In all likelihood such a book did exist, although historians argue it was simply a collection of folk medicines for curing cattle, their efficacy being such that the book gained a supernatural reputation. 

Either way, the Red Book of Appin provided the inspiration for Shame the Devil (although I’ve changed its name and embellished its origin legend).  

Imagine, if you will, that a book written by Lucifer did exist... what might some people do to get their hands on it? What might others do to ensure it never saw the light of day? And what the heck would it be worth?