Rob McInroy Books in Order

If you want the main Bob Kelty story from the beginning: Cuddies Strip → Barossa Street → Moot
If you like crime fiction based on real events: Cuddies Strip → Barossa Street
If you want the broadest view of his fiction: Cuddies Strip → Barossa Street → Moot → Burials and Other Stories
If you prefer short fiction first: Burials and Other Stories → Cuddies Strip

Rob McInroy grew up in Crieff, Perthshire, and he has never really stopped writing about that corner of Scotland. He comes from a rural, working class background, and his fiction keeps returning to Perthshire streets, fields, weather, and speech, not as backdrop, but as the thing that shapes ordinary people.

Place comes first in his work.

As a boy, he spent hours in the local library in Crieff, the building that later became Strathearn Arts. He has spoken about wanting to be a librarian, and he later worked for Perth and Kinross district libraries. That early habit of roaming shelves and following side roads through local history still shows in the range of his books.

He went on to study at the University of Hull, where he earned an MA in Creative Writing and a PhD in American Literature. Earlier in his writing life he also published speculative fiction under the name Tom Conoboy, much of it tied to work from the 2000s. Before the novels, he built his craft the slow way, by writing short fiction, entering competitions, and steadily improving on the page.

He learned by writing short.

That apprenticeship paid off. More than twenty of his short stories have been placed or shortlisted in competitions, and several won outright. The stories gathered later in Burials and Other Stories show the same interests you find in the novels, family, class, memory, belonging, loss, and the way the past keeps pressing on the present.

The big breakthrough was Cuddies Strip. Based on true crimes in Perth in 1935, the novel won the Bradford Literature Festival Northern Noir Crime Novel competition in 2018, was published in 2020, and later made the longlist for a Crime Writers' Association debut prize. It introduced Bob Kelty, the young policeman at the center of McInroy's historical crime series, and it also laid down the tone of the later books, careful research, moral pressure, sympathy for victims, and a sharp eye for the blind spots of institutions.

He followed it with Barossa Street and Moot, two novels that widen Bob Kelty's world while staying closely tied to Perthshire. Barossa Street begins with the murder of a local recluse and turns into a story about suspicion, loyalty, and the damage prejudice can do. Moot moves to July 1939, when thousands of Rover Scouts gather at Monzie Castle and a suspicious death opens onto conspiracy, espionage, and the uneasy feeling that war is about to break over everything. Across these books, McInroy keeps returning to working lives, local speech, music, and the way national history lands in small rooms and modest streets.

Then there is Burials and Other Stories, a collection of twenty linked stories set in Scotland, especially Perthshire, stretching from 1832 to the present day. It is a good guide to the wider McInroy world. The collection can be funny, bleak, tender, and eerie, sometimes all within a few pages, and one story, Fresh Watter, even acts as a prequel to the Kelty books by showing Bob as a child.

McInroy also teaches creative writing, runs workshops, and continues to expand the Kelty series. He has served as a judge for the Crime Writers' Association Historical Dagger, and more recently he said he had decided to write full time. His books are rooted in local history, but they feel lived in rather than packaged.