I suffer from a stunning lack of imagination. Seems a strange thing for someone who comes up with some dark storylines to say, but itโs true.
The title of my first novel, Dark Island, came from a beer of the same name from the Orkney Brewery. The crime in that book was based on the true story of Skara Brae being unearthed by a winter storm. It seemed to serve me well, so for my second book, THE DYING LIGHT, I stuck to the same method.
The book centres on the discovery of a man lying dead inside the Dwarfie Stane, which is a Stone Age tomb carved into a single, giant slab of sandstone lying alone in the middle of a remote valley on the island of Hoy in Orkney. Mystery surrounds the place, and anyone who has been will understand why. Hemmed in by the steep sides of the valley, with no settlements for miles in either direction, itโs not hard to allow your imagination to get the better of you (should you have one, of course). The folktales talk of giants and dwarves living here – how else can you explain how someone lifted the large, cuboid mass of rock out of the opening to the tomb? Or how the tomb came to exist in the first place, supposedly carved out by nothing more than prehistoric hand tools and an abundance of determination. The first time I came here it was a bright, sunny day, and it still gave me a chill. I knew I had to set a story here.
But I had already had the idea for Dark Island, and that wasnโt going to change. It would have to be the second book then, as by then I had decided my protagonist, Freya Sinclair (a reporter, like me) would be going through the process of being diagnosed as autistic (again, like me. Told you I had no imagination!). Finding out late in life that youโre not broken, youโre simply neurodivergent, and what that means, is a journey that takes more than one book. And so I determined I would write a series.
With Dark Island taking place at midwinter, it made sense for The Dying Light to be set at midsummer, the season in which I was visiting and the time of year when these islands experience an eerie half-light known as the Simmer Dim. Shortly before the time I hiked up here (with my dogs, Dylan and Maggie, to keep me safe of course), I had been reading about the mystery of the Man on Saddleworth Moor. A stranger had walked into a pub on the edge of the Peak District in England and asked for directions to the top of the nearby fell. Dressed in a suit and smart shoes, and with night closing in, he was advised not to attempt the hike. The next morning he was found near the summit, lying dead at the side of the path as though heโd laid down to take a nap. He had no ID on him, simply a one-way train ticket originating in London and some medication. I was fascinated by what had brought him there and who he was, and loved the idea of transporting this story to Orkney.
But why would an unknown middle-aged man hike to a remote part of Hoy in the middle of the night just to die? What killed him if there is no apparent cause of death? And how will the three words scribbled on his arm lead Freya to a truth sheโs been seeking most of her life?
Youโll have to read the book to find out.
Maybe I do have a smidgen of imagination after all.
Daniel is a former journalist whose previous jobs included writing for a local paper in Spain and working as a sub-editor at an international press agency in Hong Kong. Now living in Scotland, he wrote his debut novel,ย Dark Islandย โ a crime thriller about neurodivergent reporter, Freya Sinclair, who uncovers a disturbing conspiracy following the discovery of human remains on Orkneyโs wild Atlantic coast.
His obsession with all things Orcadian led him to take up an MLitt in Orkney and Shetland Studies at the Institute of Northern Studies in Kirkwall. Learning about the history, archaeology, and dialect of Scotlandโs second most northern county, along with his repeated trips to the islands, influenced his decision to make Dark Island the first in a series of books set there. Danielโs experience of being diagnosed as autistic and ADHD in his early forties also inspired the journey Freya goes on throughout the series.
