The Completely Wholesome Adventures of Skeleton Bob
2013
About Stuart MacBride
Stuart MacBride is a Scottish crime writer, born in Dumbarton on 27 February 1969 and raised in Aberdeen, best known for the Logan McRae novels set in and around the “Granite City”. He also writes the Oldcastle novels, several of which feature Ash Henderson, along with standalones, novellas and short stories.
MacBride studied architecture at Heriot-Watt University and worked in a string of jobs before he was published, including scrubbing toilets offshore, graphic design, web design and computer programming. His publishing deal came about through a different book, “Halfhead”, but the publishers were more interested in “Cold Granite”, a police novel about Detective Sergeant Logan McRae. He was signed for three McRae books, a deal later extended to six. “Halfhead” eventually appeared in 2009 under the name Stuart B. MacBride.
“Cold Granite” was published in 2005 and won the Barry Award for Best First Novel the following year. McRae is introduced returning to work after a year recovering from stab wounds, which earns him the nickname Lazarus from his colleagues. Much of the series pairs him with the foul-mouthed Detective Inspector Roberta Steel, and from the ninth book, “The Missing and the Dead”, the action moves out to rural Aberdeenshire. The novels are usually described as Tartan Noir, alongside the work of Ian Rankin and Val McDermid.
MacBride won the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library in 2007 and the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award for Breakthrough Author of the Year in 2008. He has named R. D. Wingfield as a literary inspiration. Away from crime fiction he has published “The Completely Wholesome Adventures of Skeleton Bob”, a picture book for children. He was one of the first ten people named in the Aberdeen Hall of Heroes, was World Stovies Champion in 2014, and won Celebrity Mastermind in 2017 answering questions on A. A. Milne.
After a six-year gap, Logan McRae returned in “This House of Burning Bones” (2025). Roberta Steel, who first took the lead in “Now We Are Dead” (2017), has two books of her own in 2026: “And the Corpse Wore Tartan”, a murder mystery set at a wedding in a Highland castle hotel, and “Blood, Rust and Steel”, in which she faces retirement after thirty years of policing Aberdeen. MacBride lives in the north-east of Scotland with his wife, Fiona.
