Raymond Stone

Raymond Stone

Raymond Stone lives in rural Aberdeenshire, in the north-east of Scotland, where the roads are long, the winters are longer, and most of his stories begin.

He has spent more than thirty years as a software engineer, writing code for banks, hospitals, energy companies and the public sector. He says that’s where he learned most of what he knows about people: how they behave under pressure, how they explain away their mistakes, and how a small lie gets bigger once a deadline is near. Those lessons turn up throughout his fiction, sometimes as comedy and sometimes as something darker.

His crime series, DI Buchan – The Early Years, follows a young detective learning the trade in the north-east of Scotland. It’s a place where everyone knows everyone, and that’s rarely a help. He also writes standalone novels. What Was Left Behind is a Scottish crime novel about the things people leave behind them. The Next Reveal is set in Edinburgh in 2031, in the year quantum computers break modern encryption and decades of supposedly private messages become readable evidence. The Long Dark is science fiction.

On the lighter side, Merge Conflict is a satirical comedy set in Pondlife Software Ltd, a fictional British tech company. Anyone who has sat through a stand-up meeting that ran for an hour will recognise it. The Aberdeenshire Postman series, beginning with The Long Way Round, follows a year on a rural post round near Turriff, through the hard winter of 2009–10. It’s funny and warm, and occasionally heartbreaking, in the tradition of James Herriot.

He is a lifelong fan of Douglas Adams. He still believes the answer is probably 42, but he hasn’t yet worked out what the question is.