Skip to content

It's our final book of Home Grown Talent Week: The Malta Job by Alwyn James!

It’s our final book of Home Grown Talent week and it’s a cracking Scottish crime novel.

Alwyn James has had several non-fiction works published and The Malta Job is his first work of fiction. In the novel, John Smith, a young Scottish journalist with literary aspirations, is sent to Malta to complete a sequel to the very successful MacMurder, a round-up of Scotland’s more infamous homicides. The author had died just before completing the planned sequel MacAbre, a follow-up tale of other gruesome Scottish crimes. Once on Malta, with the dead author’s notes, he gets involved in a gripping set of circumstances involving high romance, adventure and a bank heist.

Alwyn James on The Malta Job

After many years of writing non-fiction – both as books and articles – why did you take up the very different challenge of a novel?

It so happened that when I retired from work, my wife and I celebrated by holidaying in Malta for 77 nights and it was such a success that we repeated the experience the following year. This time, my wife suggested that instead of my usual bout of paperback holiday reading, I attempt to write instead. I thought about it and agreed it would be an ideal time to try that. Malta was a natural setting – we had fallen in love with the place and I was to be there for the next month or so.

That’s the stimulus for writing a work of fiction, but where did the idea of the plot come from?

I can pinpoint the starting point of the story. I remembered that a few years earlier, when I was Chief Press Officer at the Royal Bank of Scotland, I had received a strange question. A newspaper reporter asked me to confirm that a consignment of £300 million of RBS banknotes was arriving at Newcastle by boat the following day. The story was true, and involved Scottish notes being printed for the first time outside Britain, in Malta.

As a writer of non-fiction by profession – having worked as an editor, magazine journalist, press officer and speech writer – it was a fascinating challenge for me to create the crime and develop the plot. This was a real change of tack. Where I had always been concerned with seeking out facts and figures, events and personalities, now I had to create them. This was a rewarding exercise, but I could not resists the temptation to retreat to the comfort of non-fiction mode from time to time and you can probably see this in several passages of the book, which are factual recountings of Malta from my narrator’s perspective.

How have you established a sense of place within your writing?

Of course, in setting the story in Edinburgh and Malta, places I knew and loved, I called upon a lot of personal experiences and observations. One or two of the strange moments actually took place on the island, such as one of us sneezing in a poorly lit square in the heart of Mdina and a nun calling down ‘Bless you!’ from a mysterious balcony.

What can readers expect next from you?

For the most part I have reverted back to my non-fiction base – Other Folk’s Scotland will look at those corners of the country which have a special attraction for overseas visitors and Cursed Leaf will cover the three centuries of Scottish banknotes. John Smith will however be back for a sequel to The Malta Job. In A Dead Man’s Chest sees him back safely in Scotland, involved with another perplexing combination of challenges.

The Page Girls reading group on The Malta Job: ‘The author kept up the pace!’

The Page Girls have been meeting in each other’s homes to discuss books every month for 11 years! They are supported by their local library service, who provide their books. While this means that they do not always directly choose what they will read, it pushes them out of their comfort zone and has resulted in very eclectic tastes! For them, the best part of being in a reading group is amplifying their understanding and enjoyment of a book by hearing others’ take on it.

’The main character had a likeable naivety. We also loved the cover! During our conversations, we discussed the believability of the characters and how well-paced and convincing the plot was. For a novel, we found that certain sections of the book read almost like a travelogue. One issue the book brought up for debate was whether a platonic relationship between a man and a woman is ever viable.

Get involved

Find out more about The Malta Job by Alwyn James, published by Ringwood Publishing.

Read about all the fantastic Scottish authors taking part in Home Grown Talent Week.

Are you a member of Reading Groups for Everyone? Sign up to read and review books and get involved in fantastic projects like this.

Comments

Log in or Sign up to add a comment

News

Radio 2 Book Club - Winter titles

The Winter season of the Radio 2 Book Club is out now, with brilliant brand-new fiction titles to discover. The BBC Radio 2 Book Club is on the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show. It features a wide range of titles and authors, recommending great reads from both new and much-loved writers, encouraging listeners to perhaps try out a genre they might not have read before, and share their opinions and insights on the titles and great reads they’re enjoying right now.

Resources

How to start a reading group

Interested in joining a reading group or starting one of your own? Download our quick guide to getting started. You can also download icebreaker questions to help get your discussion started, and a social media guide to show how you can share your reading with others online.

News

Discussion guides

We know how useful a discussion guide is for your book club meeting, so here you’ll find some recent guides provided by publishers. Free to download, you can use them to help choose your next book and guide your discussion.

View our other programmes