There’s a certain kind of crime novel that wants to smell like tweed and rain and tasteful despair. You know the type: grim scenery, tidy plotting, a detective with “demons,” and the reader gets to feel hardened without ever being dirtied. Craig Robertson has never belonged to that comfort economy. Even when his books are built like page-turners, they carry the stale coffee, the deadline panic, the moral grime of the newsroom — the sense that every tragedy is also a commodity, and somebody’s always trying to sell it first.
Robertson didn’t come to crime writing from a workshop haze. He came from years of professional looking: chasing stories, interviewing the powerful, standing in the blast radius of public disaster. That background doesn’t make him “authentic.” It makes him suspicious. Suspicious of institutions, suspicious of narratives, suspicious of the way people perform grief when cameras are on. His fiction inherits that suspicion as an attitude: don’t trust the official line, don’t trust the charming local story, and definitely don’t trust the reader’s desire to feel clean at the end.
The early Glasgow-set books — the Tony Winter and Rachel Narey novels beginning with Random — don’t romanticise the city as grit-chic. They treat it as an ecosystem where violence isn’t a shocking interruption but a recurring outcome. Winter is a press photographer, which is Robertson telling you what he thinks crime stories are really about: framing. Who gets seen. Who gets cropped out. Who gets turned into an image everyone consumes and then forgets. A photographer protagonist is a nasty little mirror held up to the genre itself: all this looking, all this appetite, and the constant temptation to confuse exposure with justice.
The “hero investigator” myth survives because it lets readers believe truth is a prize for cleverness; Robertson writes like someone who knows truth is usually a bruised witness being dragged into the light for somebody else’s career.
Then the alter ego arrives: C. S. Robertson. And if you think a pseudonym is just a marketing tweak, you’re missing the psychology. This is Robertson stepping sideways out of his own brand and sharpening his knife. The Undiscovered Deaths of Grace McGill is a nasty, brilliant premise: a woman whose job is dealing with people who die alone and undiscovered — the kind of deaths society treats as administrative clutter. That’s not “plot.” That’s a worldview. It’s him putting his hands on the genre’s hidden pile of bodies: the unloved, the unnoticed, the ones nobody writes thinkpieces about. The suspense doesn’t come from a gimmick killer. It comes from the everyday horror of neglect, and the way a life can be erased quietly, efficiently, without scandal.
And then The Trials of Marjorie Crowe goes for a different throat: witchcraft as accusation, small-town persecution as entertainment, history as a weapon with a modern grip. This is Robertson doing what he’s always done — watching a crowd decide who gets sacrificed — and refusing to dress it up as folklore fun. “Witch” is just the old name for the same social reflex: punish the woman who won’t fit, then call it righteousness. The book doesn’t need bonfires to feel contemporary; it’s contemporary because it understands how communities collaborate in cruelty while telling themselves it’s for the greater good.
What ties Craig Robertson and C. S. Robertson together isn’t style so much as stink: the lingering odour of stories being processed. He writes crime the way a newsroom works a case — appetite first, ethics later, and plenty of people pretending they’re above it while leaning in for a better view. He knows the press can be heroic, yes, but he also knows it can be a meat grinder. The fiction keeps that ambivalence alive. It doesn’t let you pretend that telling a story is a neutral act.
The cosy-crime crowd wants murder as a puzzle and community as a cuddle; Robertson writes community as a tribunal and the puzzle as a way to delay admitting what everyone already decided.
This is also why the alter ego matters. “C. S.” isn’t a cute mask; it’s a permission slip to get uglier, to centre a different kind of protagonist, to leave the procedural scaffolding behind and go straight at the social mechanism. It’s Robertson acknowledging — without saying it out loud — that the market rewards neat lanes, and that sometimes you have to slip the knife in under a different name to keep the work honest.
So no, don’t treat C. S. Robertson as a side project or a rebrand. It’s the same writer, same instincts, just less willing to play nice with genre comfort. The point is not that he can write in different modes. The point is that, in every mode, he keeps dragging the reader back to the same ugly fact: crime stories aren’t about solving. They’re about who gets believed, who gets used, and who gets left undiscovered on purpose. Keep that in your mouth when you read him. Don’t rinse it out.