Macrae appears to have entered (with murderous intent) the house of his deeply unpleasant neighbour Lachlan Mackenzie, a local constable. A young crofter, Roderick Macrae, wrote up the catastrophes of his life while awaiting trial in Inverness in 1869, accused of three savage killings. The wholly fictitious premise is that the author, Burnet himself, while looking into his own Scottish roots, discovered a fragment of a memoir that apparently set Edinburgh society of the time alight. The subtitle of the book reads: “Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae”, and these ersatz papers build a picture of an insular Highland crofting community in the 19th century while also presenting a fascinating picture of attitudes to the criminology of the era. In this case, Burnet includes witness statements, postmortem documents on murder victims, a documentary account of a trial - and a lengthy memoir by the man accused of triple murder. His Bloody Project appears to channel a bookish version of the currently fashionable “found footage” film genre, in which verisimilitude is suggested by randomly cobbled-together documentary material forming a fragmentary narrative.
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