Criminally Good Whisky Tales

Calling all budding crime writers: The 2026 Glencairn Glass Crime Short Story Competition is open for submissions. In partnership with Bloody Scotland, Scotland’s international crime writing festival, writers from around the world, both published and unpublished, are invited to submit an original crime story. The only criterion is that the story's main protagonist must be from Scotland, and the submission must be fewer than 2,000 words. It’s free to enter, and the entry deadline is midnight on March 31, 2026, Scotland time.

The winner of the short story competition and the runner-up will be announced in the summer. The top prize is £1,000 (around $1,350), a set of six bespoke engraved Glencairn glasses, and the chance to make a guest appearance at the Bloody Scotland Festival in September, while the runner-up gets £500 ($675). Both stories will be published on Glencairn Crystal’s website.

Glencairn, which has sold more than 50 million whisky glasses over the past 25 years, sponsors two other crime fiction awards through Bloody Scotland: the McIlvanney Prize for the Scottish Crime Book of the Year and the Bloody Scotland Debut Crime Novel of the Year. The competition is a launchpad for new crime writers, with previous winners going on to secure major publishing deals.

Whisky makes regular appearances in Scottish crime fiction, slipping between the pages of brutal murders like an extra character. Hunched figures strike deals in the backrooms of dimly lit pubs, late-night confessions spill over a dram, and embittered detectives seek solace at the bottom of a bottle. Whisky sets the mood of this literary genre, drawing readers into a world of gritty realism inhabited by cops, tough guys, crime lords, and victims alike, steeped in the dark recesses of Scottish drinking culture. Ian Rankin’s novels regularly set detective inspector John Rebus up with a pint and a whisky chaser at The Oxford Bar in Edinburgh. Denzil Meyrick, the former Springbank distillery manager who passed away in 2025, set his D.C.I. Daley books in the fictional town of Kinloch, modeled on Campbeltown, beginning with “Whisky from Small Glasses” and ending with “Last Orders.” From Stuart McBride, Denise Mina, Chris Brookmyre, Peter May’s The Lewis Trilogy, and William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw series to newer voices such as Allan Gaw, who was the runner-up in the 2022-23 competition, Scottish crime fiction continues to thrive. Someone must be making a killing, and you never know, you could be next.