The (In)authenticity of Invented History in Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project

Summary

Graeme Macrae Burnet (b. 1967) was an unfamiliar name in literary circles until 2013, when he won The Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for his first novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014), a metafictional detective mystery story set in France. This book received favourable reviews but it could hardly be described as a conspicuous breakthrough (Forshaw 2016). Although Burnet claims that he had wanted to be a professional writer ever since he was a teenager (D. Robinson 2016) and that during his university studies of English the writer in residence, Hunter Steele, encouraged him to try to get some of his stories published (Major 2017), his path to writing fiction was a lengthy one. After graduation from Glasgow University, he spent much of the 1990s teaching English as a foreign language in Czechoslovakia, France and Portugal, before going back to university in 1999, this time taking a degree in international security studies at the University of St Andrews, after which he worked as a researcher for independent television documentary makers (D. Robinson 2016). The critical and commercial success of his second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), allowed him to start his career as a full-time writer.

When His Bloody Project was included in the 2016 Man Booker Prize longlist, most of the critics and reviewers expressed surprise that the book had managed to do so in spite of its being genre fiction, namely a crime novel. The critical responses grew all the more astonished when it appeared on the shortlist, leaving behind works by far more renowned and prize-winning authors such as J.M. Coetzee and A.L. Kennedy. However, although its central event is a triple murder, the writer himself points out that rather than it being a crime novel he prefers to call it “a novel about a crime” (Cha 2016). With its portrayal of the daily life and customs of a destitute crofting community in a remote Scottish Highland hamlet in the second half of the 19^th century and its offering of an insight into the early history and methods of modern criminology, including the contemporary anthropological and psychological theories it tended to rely on, His Bloody Project represents, above all, a breed of historical fiction.