It's writer Gordon Burn.

Willingly – and sometimes not so willingly – Gordon has delved into the lives of all of these characters to write about them.

He revealed this week – before heading to the Inverness Book Festival – that he was asked to write about the Wests before the full horror of their torture and killings was uncovered.

When it all began to come out, Gordon nearly changed his mind about working on the book, until friends persuaded him that it was a story that had to be told.

The Yorkshire Ripper was the subject of his first-ever book – Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son.

Gordon would visit Peter Sutcliffe's – or the Ripper's – father, who talked about what his son was like.

But it was a world away from Gordon's experience working on Happy Like Murderers, the Wests' story.

"I spent so much longer on it than anyone else – unfortunately, because it was so horrible.

"I had everything from the trial, police scene of crime photos, stage by stage as they were dragging everything up, the transcripts of what Fred and Rosemary West had said.

"I shredded it all as soon as I'd finished.

"I tried to write it as fast as I could, and I've never re-read it.

"At the end of it I knew I would never write a true crime book again.

"I felt very down for a while after finishing it."

He then used what he'd seen at Rose West's trial to write Fullalove, a novel about a ruthless tabloid reporter.

Gordon revealed that after the true crime books, he gave himself something really different to focus on.

"After the book about Peter Sutcliffe, I wrote Pocket Money, a book about snooker, as light relief.

"People like Jimmy White and Alex Higgins were on the road all the time, though they were earning pretty good money. The good thing was that they weren't surrounded by managers and the access to them was good."

But Gordon laughed at the idea he was some kind of snooker player himself.

"I think on the jacket cover I claimed I had a highest break of five, but that was probably an exaggeration."

Last year Gordon moved on with his own style, blending fact with fiction.

And this time his lead character was... the news itself! In Born Yesterday, he has taken the big stories of last summer – the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, Gordon Brown taking over as Prime Minister, the story of Prince William's girlfriend Kate Middleton, the terrorist attacks on Glasgow Airport – and put them in a novel where the story is being told by a dog-walker who turns out to be Gordon himself.

"It was a strange time for me," Gordon said. "My parents had both died in the last two or three years and I felt the connection I had with the North East was severed.

"But I felt that other people were feeling the same sense of unease I had with what was happening in the news."

Gordon began to start seeing odd coincidences and strange links between things that had no real connection.

He noticed that Gordon Brown had a blind eye and so did Robert Murat – the man accused at first of being involved in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann.

And even Madeleine herself has different coloured eyes.

Gordon also noticed that there was a weird health worker link between the people who tried to blow up Glasgow Airport and London pub Tiger Tiger.

"I think those are the kind of coincidences you can write about because they are there in real life. I don't think you could put them into a novel because people would think you were over-egging it.

"Blair was replaced by this dour man who couldn't have been more unlike Blair who had never stopped smiling! Though Brown started smiling this summer. I think he must have been having smiling lessons..."

So does turning real events into a story, work?

Gordon's planning to do a follow-on book, so it's an idea he wants to take further.

He's currently working on a couple of other ideas too.

"I'm never not writing," he laughed.

"I'm thinking about a book on Bob Dylan."

And he is also looking at an idea brought to him by former Dr Who actor, Christopher Ecclestone.

But taking real-life and adding his own fictional bits into the mix, is what makes Gordon tick.

"I always wanted to be a journalist rather than anything else."

He had admired American writers like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, telling the story behind a real-life news item.

"That kind of writing used the story-telling of fiction books to tell a non-fiction story.

"And I still get more of a buzz from knowing something really happened.

"I think imagination is really over-rated!"

* Gordon Burn is at Eden Court as part of Inverness Book Festival today (Thursday) at 7pm.

entertainment@highland-news.co.uk

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