Tartan noir has a bad habit of selling Scotland like a scented candle: rain, stone, a brooding glen, misery with a view. It flatters the reader’s appetite for “atmosphere” and lets the violence pass as local colour. Natalie Jayne Clark steps into that tradition and does something far less photogenic: she drags the genre into the paperwork, the workplace, the petty power, the money, the boredom, the cold daylight that hits at the wrong hour and makes you mean. That’s not a vibe. That’s a correction.
Clark’s debut, The Malt Whisky Murders, plants a queer couple—Eilidh and Morag—inside the whisky economy, not beside it. They’re not tourists sipping heritage; they’re trying to run a distillery, in rural Kintyre/Campbeltown territory, with all the ambition and vulnerability that comes with staking your life on an industry that’s both myth and machine. Whisky is Scotland’s global costume and its real business, and Clark refuses to treat it as a tartan prop. She uses it the way it deserves to be used: as a system that breeds fantasy for outsiders while grinding locals down in the back rooms.
“Atmosphere” is what you call a place when you don’t want to admit you’re consuming it.
That’s the quiet reinvention here. Clark doesn’t hand you Scotland as scenery; she hands you Scotland as consequence. The landscape is present, sure, but it isn’t performing for you. The darkness she talks about—the thin winter light, the psyche that shifts under it—doesn’t exist to romanticise anyone’s suffering. It exists because it changes behaviour, tempers, patience, judgement. In other words: it’s material, not marketing. Tartan noir has always claimed it was interested in the national mood, the hard edge behind the postcard. Too often it just swaps postcard blue for postcard grey and calls that honesty. Clark’s writing feels more like a local argument than a guided tour.
You can see where that bite comes from. Clark isn’t a heritage-curator novelist parachuted into “crime” for a trend cycle. She’s a working arts person—writer, producer, performer—who’s built a public voice through spoken word and culture work, and who’s publicly committed to neurodivergent accessibility. That background shows up in the book’s reported dark comedy and its impatience with polite mythmaking. Comedy, when it’s done properly, is ruthless about pretence. It doesn’t let institutions hide behind grand narratives. And in Scotland, the grand narratives are endless: the noble islander, the plucky village, the proud craft, the romantic ruin. Clark doesn’t burn those myths down in a big dramatic speech. She just doesn’t kneel to them.
She also refuses the genre’s laziest moral choreography. A lot of tartan noir still centres straight male weariness as if it’s the national weather. The “damaged detective” is treated like a birthright; women are often either tragic catalysts or glossy competence with trauma. Clark’s central couple doesn’t exist to tick a representation box or soften the violence with a “love story.” They exist because queer domesticity inside a small community is not an ornamental subplot—it’s social reality with consequences. It changes who has leverage, who gets believed, who gets watched, who gets punished for wanting more than their allotted portion of life.
And then there’s the point everyone dodges: the tourist glaze isn’t just aesthetic. It’s economic. When a place becomes a product, locals become supporting cast. A murder mystery that treats the setting like a brochure is participating in that extraction, even if it pretends it’s “celebrating” the culture. Clark’s choice to embed the story in distillery ambition and small-town bureaucracy is a refusal of that extraction. She’s writing about how power actually circulates: through licensing, reputation, gatekeeping, old networks, and the petty humiliations that decide whether your dream becomes a business or a punchline.
Tartan noir doesn’t need more mist; it needs more class analysis, more workplace spite, more attention to who gets to “belong” and who gets priced out.
If the genre wants to keep calling itself gritty, it can start by dropping the tourist glaze and admitting what it’s been using Scotland for. Clark’s book is a reminder that crime fiction is at its best when it stops selling place and starts exposing the pressures that make people dangerous. Don’t read her for a romantic Scotland. Read her for a Scotland that doesn’t perform. And if you’re still craving the brochure version, that’s on you—keep your hands off the genre’s future.
