December 2024

Complete with access to exclusive two-hour Beatcroft Social ’25 for 24′ show It is my birthday. Only in the extremities of the Southern Hemisphere, as I write, but my old friend Douglas has just messaged congratulations from Auckland, so I’m counting myself as having entered my 70th year on the planet. Never thought I’d get…

The Shetland Decapitations: ‘Rubber Johnny Ltd, of Tonbridge, Kent.’ Mary had an old, battered Toyota HiLux truck which she loved like a loyal Labrador. One with mange and respiratory problems. Nervously, she checked that the shotgun rack was empty, and that her trusty Mossberg over-and-under pump-action 20-gauge was safely at home under the sink. The…

Includes Martin guitars, a Vauxhall Cresta and an Aston Martin DB5. Merry Christmas! I’m driving out to Heglibister in Weisdale to collect our Christmas Day oysters I’ve to be there at 2.30pm, by which time darkness will be creeping in round the edges, here beyond 60 degrees north. Even though the post-solstice light has already…

The Shetland Decapitations, episode one: Headfirst In the windswept Shetland Islands, people are losing their heads. A series of bizarre ritual murders sees eminent members of the community dismembered, their body parts left in embarrassing positions. While the energy company building the world’s biggest wind farm on the islands fights to stop the sabotage threatening…

Inhalation, exhalation and talking at the same time. Also: some Substack housekeeping. The Shetland decapitations are coming… If you’re looking for the first instalment of A Passing of Wind: The Shetland decapitations, a somewhat sidelong, fictional look at crime and detection in my home islands, that’ll arrive on Friday evening. Meanwhile, as I ponder the…

Spoilers, obviously. And on to space, the final frontier. Or possibly Unst Perhaps it wasn’t wise to come to Shetland fresh from binge-watching both The Day of the Jackal reboot (a pale shadow of the fantastic David Fincher/Michael Fassbender movie The Killer which it so obviously rips off) and the Netflix Santa’s-got-a-Kalashnikov series Black Doves…

An Ayrshire primary school in the 1960s. Miss MacNab (“M-A-C CAPITAL N”) had impressive arms, marbled and massive, like Popeye’s. Maybe she ate spinach every day. Dad had given me a spoonful once, dark green, almost black from a tin. It tasted of grass and earth. My biceps didn’t expand, as Popeye’s did in the…

It’s Shetland, Season 9, episode 5. Sort of. The red herrings are coming thick and fast now. So many I’m, uh, floundering. Actually, they’re not so much herrings as a mixture of anchovies, sardines and mildly magenta piltocks. The show has well and truly jumped the spoot, which I believe is a technical term within…