Crime fiction loves a “setting” the way lifestyle magazines love a kitchen: a backdrop you can fetishise while pretending the mess isn’t yours. Scotland gets it worst—endless drizzle, handsome ruin, a corpse posed like local colour. Peter May came out of Glasgow and television, and he should have been the perfect supplier of that kind of scenic product. Instead, his best books treat landscape like a co-conspirator: not pretty, not neutral, not there to soothe you, but actively shaping what people will do—and what they’ll lie about after.
You can feel the screenwriter in him: the way he frames an entrance, the way he times a reveal, the way he understands that place isn’t wallpaper but leverage. He wrote and created major UK TV drama, learned how to build pressure through routine, repetition, and the quiet threat of “everybody knows.” That training doesn’t make his novels cinematic in the lazy, compliment-y sense. It makes them procedural about atmosphere—how a town, an island, a weather system, a road with no turn-off can become a method of control.
The Lewis trilogy is the clearest example because it’s where the market’s worst habits come sniffing. The Outer Hebrides are catnip for readers who want their darkness artisanal: salt air, old songs, ancient stone, then a tidy solution before bed. The Blackhouse, The Lewis Man, The Chessmen don’t play that game. The island doesn’t “set the mood.” It enforces it. The landscape keeps memories preserved and grudges fermented. It limits options, narrows futures, turns the past into a physical presence you can’t outrun because the road literally ends.
May’s landscapes don’t decorate the crime; they manufacture the conditions for it, then stand there like an alibi everyone agrees not to question.
And he doesn’t let you romanticise that complicity as “community.” In the Lewis books, community is often surveillance with manners. People don’t keep quiet because they’re noble; they keep quiet because the social cost of truth is higher than the moral cost of concealment. That’s what island fiction is supposed to admit and rarely does, because readers want their remote places to feel spiritually corrective. May’s remote places feel like traps with polite signage.
It’s not just Scotland, either. His China Thrillers are a long stare at Beijing during a period of rapid transformation, and the city isn’t exotic garnish—it’s scale, speed, and erasure made concrete. The streets and buildings aren’t there for “vivid atmosphere”; they’re there to show how quickly a place can rewrite itself and grind the inconvenient into dust. His recurring partnership—Li Yan and Margaret Campbell—moves through a city where institutions are thick, public faces matter, and the cost of asking the wrong question can be paid by people who didn’t even speak.
Then he swings again with the Enzo books in France, using a different kind of landscape: not wild, but cultivated—vineyards, villages, respectable facades. The point is the same. The scenery is complicit. It helps people believe their own stories. It gives them somewhere pretty to hide the rot. The wager and the cold cases are just the excuse to walk you through how “civilisation” becomes another form of concealment.
This is where May’s work annoys me—in a useful way. The genre wants landscape to do emotional labour for the reader: to provide meaning, mood, catharsis. May makes landscape refuse that job. Weather doesn’t cleanse. Sea doesn’t purify. A view doesn’t redeem the people standing in it. That’s a direct slap at the cosy-crime instinct to turn place into a comfort object.
The industry sells “sense of place” as a luxury feature; May uses place as pressure, the kind that makes your moral choices smaller and your excuses louder.
So yes: Glasgow-born screenwriter turned crime novelist. But the interesting part isn’t the career pivot; it’s the refusal to let setting be a holiday. May writes places that remember, places that corner, places that help people commit to silence. If you’re reading him for the scenery, you’re missing the warning. Stop treating landscape like a postcard and start treating it like evidence.