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Peter May on revisiting the characters and locations of his hit Hebridean trilogy
You're not the first writer to conceive a hero and a setting for a limited number of novels, and then to return to them. What has drawn you back to Fin Macleod and the Hebrides?
When I first wrote the Lewis Trilogy in the earlier years of this century, such was the success of the books - The Blackhouse, The Lewis Man and The Chessmen - that I came under immediate pressure both from readers and publishers to write more. But, in truth, I felt that across the three books I had told the story of these characters and their relationships, and that really there was nothing left to write.
There was, of course, also the fact that in reality, the murder rate on the Isle of Lewis - the setting for the books - averages about one a century. Which is why I had resisted pressure to turn the trilogy into a long-running series in the first place.
Time to move on.
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'Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.'