Bog Myrtle & Peat

In the days when I had to be driven, we used to take the high road to Edinburgh. My parents loved the Beef Tub way, and I was not old or wise enough to tell them that it’s quicker to go through Biggar. So we climbed into the hills and slipped down through the mass of moorland to Tweedsmuir and Broughton. It’s a nicer road certainly, and driving across such vast and obvious catchments helps you to understand how Galloway is connected to Edinburgh.

But the Beef Tub road also had a heap of stories around it. My parents loved to tell the tales as we went, and I have each one listed in my mind’s eye almost thirty years later. My mother’s father farmed at a place called Kindledores by the old Crook Inn. You can see glimpses of the sandstone farmhouse as you birl along the road, but it’s a windfarm now and the neighbours have gone to commercial forestry. My grandfather’s world is rapidly vanishing, but on those car journeys to and from the city, tales from his life were knitted in to bigger stories of Scottish history and myth, from the reivers to the covenanters.

A few miles north of Moffat, the road bends in a turn around a bridge. Oak trees lean on the downstream side of a burn which lies so deeply in its ravine that you never see the water from the road. My parents explained that here was the site of an awful murder; the place where an evil doctor came to dispose of a suitcase which contained the remains of his dismembered wife.

That story appalled me, but it was scant and there was nothing else to support it. I’ve told it here with as much flesh as I first heard it; two or three sentences without context. I imagined some demonic Victorian with a glowing red eyes and a top hat driving a carriage full of bones, but in truth that road is so loaded with stories that we’d hardly passed the bridge before another one came. When I think of it now, it’s only a flicker amongst many.

I was delighted to learn in November that my book Native was shortlisted for the Saltire Society’s Scottish Non-Fiction Book of the Year prize. I didn’t win, but in the aftermath of the prize-giving I decided to read around some of the other shortlisted books. Almost at random, I selected Ruxton by Tom Wood. Understanding that it’s often a mistake to know too much about a book before you start reading it, I bought it as sight unseen. Feeling slightly confined by the practicalities of living with a small child, I’ve recently started to get up earlier in the morning in order to have something of my own time in the day. I started Ruxton at 5:15am the following morning.

Ruxton is a complete account of the murders which culminated in that gully on the Beef Tub road. It follows the story of Dr. Buck Ruxton, the double murderer who, in 1936, butchered his wife and their maid in an attempt to conceal their identities from the police. Following the trail of evidence left in the wake of this horror, the narrative plots the challenges and breakthroughs experienced by the policemen and scientists who finally brought Ruxton to justice. If I wanted to put flesh on the bones of a childhood ghost-story, here it was in spades. I finished Ruxton at 11:30pm on the same day I started it.

By grandiose or pretentious standards, the book is not a great work of literature. It’s often knotty and the chapters overlap. Even the typeface, design and print quality feel clunky, but these snooty quibbles evaporate beside the certain fact that I was absolutely hooked by this book from beginning to end. I could not put it down.

I’m a novice when it comes to true crime. For me, the genre lies too close to salacious voyeurism; it makes me cringe, but I understand the interest which grows around awful things. I’m also a pathetic and pretentious toad, and I must admit that I might not have read this book if I had known what it was in advance. But within that embarrassing truth, I have to say that Ruxton came as a slap to my self-satisfied little face.

Tom Wood is the perfect person to interpret these events and relate them to a modern audience. He’s a retired policeman, and it’s nowhere near a note of criticism to say that he writes like one. There are shocks and gruesome facts where they’re needed, but the real pleasure of Ruxton is in that comforting, understated procedural voice. The horror is measured and checked by the writer’s steadiness – everything works from there.

If this was a work of fiction, it would be almost impossible for a third-party author to synthesise or conjure up a more authentic pitch and inflection in the narrative voice – Tom Wood makes no claim to feature at all in this tale, but somehow he is almost the main character. Knowing his subject back to front, he’s simultaneously enthusiastic and world-weary, gritty and dry. In this sense, Ruxton is almost an objet trouvé that would make Truman Capote sick – the perfect voice coinciding with the perfect story.

Standing outside this genre as I do, I might have sniffed at the mere suggestion of reading Ruxton. But in truth, I was more absorbed by this story and more deeply compelled to finish it at a sprint than anything else I’ve read for years. If there is such a thing as “Dumfries and Galloway noir”, here is the motherlode, and it’s been a complete pleasure to lend my copy of this book to several people – all of whom agree that Ruxton is a jewel.