Roderick confesses from the start his desire to rid the world of Lachlan Mackenzie, who as local constable is invested with power to keep the community in check, and uses it to make Roddy’s life even more of a misery than it already was.
It also includes a psychological report on Roderick by the real-life prison doctor James Bruce Thomson, who has firm opinions on the characteristics and proclivities of the “criminal class”. The apparently guileless account of how Roderick did indeed enter the house of his overbearing neighbour with croman, flaughter and murderous intent (a glossary is provided) is complicated by witness statements, medical reports and a journalistic account of the trial. This manuscript, we are teasingly informed, divided the Edinburgh literati of the time, who feared a rerun of James Macpherson’s 18th-century literary hoax Ossian and considered it “quite inconceivable that a semi-literate peasant could produce such a sustained and eloquent piece of writing”. Subtitled “Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae”, His Bloody Project contains the 17-year-old crofter’s memoir, written while awaiting trial in Inverness in 1869 for three brutal murders, and “discovered” by the author while researching his own Highland roots. The book is also a blackly funny investigation into madness and motivation, which perhaps leads no further than one character’s grim conclusion: “One man can no more see into the mind of another than he can see inside a stone.”
It’s a psychological thriller masquerading as a slice of true crime a collection of “found” documents that play lovingly with the traditions of Scottish literature an artful portrait of a remote crofting community in the 19th century that showcases contemporary theories about class and criminology.
G raeme Macrae Burnet’s second novel from the crime imprint of the tiny Scottish publisher Saraband, a surprise inclusion on the Man Booker longlist, is a slippery creature indeed.
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