Allan Martin Books in Order

Allan Martin is a Scottish crime writer whose novels move between the west coast of Scotland and Estonia, two places that clearly matter to him. He was born in Glasgow, worked for many years as a schoolteacher, teacher-trainer and university lecturer, and only turned seriously to fiction after taking early retirement.

That late turn matters.

Before novels took over, much of his writing life was academic. He has said that retirement gave him the time to focus on what he really wanted to write. He began with history and family history, then shifted toward fiction, carrying that same interest in place, memory, and the weight of the past into his crime novels. He has also said that an early draft only started to feel real when his wife Vivien, an honest first reader, told him it had something.

The spark for The Peat Dead came from regular visits to Islay and the remains of a Second World War airbase there. That book introduced Inspector Angus Blue, an Oban-based detective who works cases across the Hebrides and the west coast. Readers who enjoy Martin tend to like the way he mixes solid police work with island atmosphere, old secrets, and the feeling that history never stays buried for long.

The Dead of Jura, The Dead of Appin, The Dead of Oban, and The Dead of Mull carry that same approach into new settings and new investigations. These books are crime novels first, but they also pay close attention to the places they happen in, from ferries and harbours to small communities where everyone knows something, even if they do not say it out loud. There is dry humour in them too, along with politics, money, and the occasional very dangerous lie.

He took a different route with Death in Tallinn and Winter Blood.

Those novels follow Chief Inspector Jüri Hallmets in 1930s Estonia, a setting Martin knows through years of travel with Vivien, who is also a writer. He has spoken about visiting Estonia regularly, learning some of the language, and translating an Estonian closed-room mystery from 1937, The Oracle. That background helps explain why the Hallmets books feel so tied to their setting. Readers come for the murder cases, but they stay for the sense of a small country trying to hold itself together while bigger powers close in.

Martin has also published short fiction, including stories in iScot and 404Ink, as well as the collection Tales Murderous and Mysterious. Even in shorter form, he seems drawn to the same questions. What do people hide. How long can the past wait. What happens when an ordinary place turns suddenly strange.

His breakthrough as a novelist came with The Peat Dead, which was shortlisted for the McIlvanney Debut Prize at the Bloody Scotland Crime Festival in 2019. That kind of recognition helped put his fiction in front of more readers, but the appeal of the books is easy to spot on the page. The plots are careful, the settings feel lived in, and his detectives are more interested in what is right than what is convenient.

He still lives in Glasgow with Vivien, and they continue to travel in Scotland, Germany, and Estonia. That mix of travel, research, and close attention to place keeps feeding the fiction.