Peter May, who has died aged 74, was a crime writer who moved into bestseller territory with a trilogy of novels set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.

The first of those books, The Blackhouse, established the character of Fin Macleod, a Lewis-born detective living in Edinburgh who returns to the island to investigate a murder – in the process opening up dark memories of why he had been glad to leave.

A number of UK publishers had turned the novel down, so it came out initially in France, where it was a great success in 2009. As a result the London publishing house Quercus bought the rights, and when it then entered the UK bestseller charts, they suggested to May that he should write a trilogy.

He initially joked that this would be impossible, since murders occur in Lewis only once every 50 years, but he was soon persuaded. The Lewis Man (2011) and The Chessmen (2012) followed, and his books garnered literary awards in the UK, France, China and the US.

May was a Glaswegian, and his contact with the Hebrides began in the early 1990s when he was working as a writer with Scottish Television (STV). There was encouragement to produce Gaelic language programmes as part of the channel’s franchise remit, and STV was enthusiastic about making the first Gaelic soap opera. The head of Gaelic, Rhoda Macdonald, dispatched May and his wife, Janice Hally, to Lewis to research the possibilities, which included finding actors and writers in the language.

They spent some time living in a campervan at Ness, the most northerly point of the island, and returned with the idea of a subtitled series called Machair, which ran for six years on STV. May became its director and Hally was the main scriptwriter.

Machair also proved to be the key to May’s future success. He was an acute listener, and stored away the stories he heard and characters he encountered. In due course these would emerge through the Lewis trilogy and other island-based novels such as Coffin Road (2016), I’ll Keep You Safe (2018) and The Black Loch (2024). His vast following of readers loved them all, and he sold 15 million copies of his books worldwide. Among his many fans were those who ran the Visit Outer Hebrides tourist board, which found that his books increased visitor numbers to the region. Lewis even had a Peter May Trail celebrating the locations in his books.

Born in Glasgow to Leslie, a teacher, and his wife, Molly, May grew up in the suburb of Clarkston. He was a rebellious youth who played in a rock band called the Aristokrats, and his academic career at Eastwood secondary school ended abruptly in expulsion, after which he went down to London with his teenage pals from the band. When they ran out of money, he ended up returning home to take a job at the National Savings Bank (now NS&I), although the experience did at least provide material for one of his later novels, Runaway (2015), in which five teenage musicians from Glasgow go to London in search of stardom, but instead get caught up in a nasty murder.

May eventually left the NSB to take a journalism course at Edinburgh College of Commerce, after which he worked as a reporter at the Paisley Daily Express, Glasgow Evening Times and the Scotsman and, as usual, turned personal experience into the basis of a novel, The Reporter, published in 1978, which was made into a 13-part BBC Scotland series, The Standard, the same year. This took May, in his late 20s, into television and a 15-year stint with STV, where he wrote more than 200 episodes of the popular daytime soap Take the High Road and where, eventually, he was sent to Lewis to carry out the research that led to Machair.

Years later May confessed that during that period on Lewis he also contrived to fit in a visit to China, another setting for a series of his crime novels. These became the China Thrillers (1999-2010), which won him acclaim and awards in China, though it was his time in Lewis that led to greater commercial success.

In all May had 71 books published on a wide range of themes. During the Covid-19 period he remembered a novel he had written 15 years earlier about murderers being pursued in London while the city was in the grip of a global pandemic. Lockdown, eventually published in 2020, had been rejected at the time as too far-fetched.

After announcing his intended retirement, May returned to insular themes for his final book, Island of the Dead, which is set on a fictional archipelago 40 miles into the Atlantic, which bears a striking resemblance to St Kilda. It is due to be published in January.

He is survived by Janice, whom he married in 1990, and a daughter, Carol, from his first marriage, to Katrina Hutcheson, which ended in divorce.

• Peter May, novelist, born 20 December 1951; died 25 September 2026