Scottish crime fiction is a crime. Tartan noir, gory Gaelic gothic, Highland death-caber flings, mystery Central Belt lashings, brutal Borders Bible bashings. Use whatever catch-all name you want, it’s still a boring disgrace, a terminal failure of the country’s dark imagination. Any author interview in the Scottish press is guaranteed to be with a crime author.

And who are these authors? A creepy, basement-dwelling subset of humanity: crosseyed coffin droolers, childhood dead pony trauma bearers, high school bullying revenge ragers, inheritance-seeking husband death plotters, rotund morbid death-tamperers, overly tattooed bloody stiletto lickers. Grizzled drunken drug-abusing self-destructive defective detectives, Caledonian corpse caressers, red herring-bearing sad ned wrecks, mask-wearing Scooby-Doo villains, there's an endless cliché buffet between their hacky putrid pages. These oddballs write for a middle class audience of sniffy jaded trauma voyeurs, who want a vicarious kill thrill before bedtime from their penny dreadfuls.

But the single worst thing ever to happen to Scottish crime fiction hasn’t happened...yet. The country's murder-fantasising former First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, a wannabe-but-never-gonnabe ‘writer’, has announced her intentions to write a braindead, cashing-in crime novel. She says she has “many people I want to kill” from her time serving herself in the public eye. She has said this bitter, angry tome “might have a murder literally on every page.”  Not content with having made us live in her version of a divisive, fictional, science-denying, anti-utopian Hell during her dysfunctional reign of error as FM, Ms Sturgeon clearly has a lot of frightening, barely-sublimated rage to exorcise in public. It's the power of pulp compels her!

So it is for this reason I am calling for a blanket ban on the publication of Scottish crime writing. No more insanity vanity press releases! Make crime writing a literal crime! We can stop the manhating, homicidal, self-described “counter-factual” publication of yet another insult to add to Sturgeon’s list of sneering smears towards Scotland. And we wouldn’t have to suffer another preening, egocentric, year-long promotional book tour from her. Do it for the children. Or pets. Or grannies. Or something. But just do it!!

Let’s stop the blight of Scottish crime fiction now. Enough is enough.

“Fight crime. Justice prevails” – Rat Pfink.

(Parody. No real writers were harmed during the making of this production, especially that one Scottish crime writer who skates.)