Alastair Brown is the author of the Joe Beck crime-thriller books. His first book, Army of One, was published in February 2018 and he's currently working on his next installment in the Joe Beck series.

He was born and raised in Bellshill, Scotland, a small town about fourteen miles east of Glasgow, where he graduated from the city’s University of Glasgow with a master of arts honors degree in business & management before going on to become a marketer for many large UK blue chip companies.

He likes music, listening to everything from Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen to Ed Sheeran and Coldplay, and everything in between. And he loves crime films and documentaries. He practically runs on caffeine, drinking anything from five to ten cups of coffee a day, sometimes more, but never less. And, occasionally, he writes. He can’t really remember when he first decided to really explore writing, but thinks it was probably one day where he was sitting in a stewing, stale-aired meeting room observing grey-haired and shirt and tie-clad marketers pick apart the ad agency’s presentation for his employer’s next credit card campaign. That was probably the catalyst, he thinks, as a lot of writing is observing. Noticing how people interact, absorbing how they behave in given circumstances and watching how scenarios play out, then describing it all back later, on paper. All cranked up beyond any possible realm of reality.

The son of a welder and a civil servant, he actually grew up in a family of non-readers. His family cared very little for books. In fact, he can’t remember there ever being any books lying around the house when he was young. But he always had a creative mind. And, sitting in that meeting room, it just dawned on him: it was time to let it out.

At first, he had lots of ideas. He dreamt up a whole host of different characters, envisaging them playing out gripping scenes, but he recognized one major problem: he didn’t really know how to do it. He wanted to write a book, but he didn't know where to start. So, he did something about it. He bought print books from a bookstore and ebooks from Amazon and he began reading. He studied the prose, the structure of the sentences, the paragraphs and the chapters. He contemplated the characters, their depth and their interactions. And he observed how other authors drip-fed nuggets of information and really arced their plots. It was after reading maybe only five books that he recognized how to do it. And, then, he just started writing.

He gets his inspiration from everyday scenarios, from people he walks past, from the places he visits, from the things he sees on the news, the broadcasts he hears on the radio and the reports he reads about in the newspapers. There’s also never a moment goes by where he doesn’t ponder the phraseology of what he worked on the day before or where he’s not dreaming up the scenes of what he’ll work on the day after. He’s a natural-born storyteller who loves writing and one thing’s for damn sure: he’s well in the business of entertainment.

Author Alastair Brown


View Alastair Brown's books

Get news and updates

Sign up to be among the first to hear about Alastair Brown's news, views, announcements and more.

Once you've signed up, I'll send you a short confirmation email. If you don't receive it in a few minutes, check your spam or junk mail folders in case your email provider drops it in there.