Every publisher in Britain turned down The Blackhouse, the novel Peter May was convinced was the best thing he had ever written. May, the Glasgow-born television dramatist whose rescued manuscript became the first book of his bestselling Lewis Trilogy, died on September 25, 2026, at his home in the south of France. He was 74.

His wife, the screenwriter Janice Hally, shared the news on his Facebook page three days later. "I have to convey the most awful news. Peter has died. I have no words to express the loss," she wrote. His books had sold about 15 million copies around the world, the BBC reported.

He had written The Blackhouse in 2005 and set it on the Isle of Lewis, where he had spent years filming a Gaelic drama in the 1990s. Editors said they loved it but did not know how to sell it. "It just got rejected by publisher, after publisher, after publisher, literally every publisher in the UK," he told The Connexion in 2019. To lift his spirits he wrote something lighter, a cold-case mystery set in France around a Scottish forensic scientist named Enzo Macleod, and that was refused at home too until an American publisher took the series on.

The rescue came through France. At the book fair in Brive, a chance conversation with his French publisher, Danielle Dastugue of Le Rouergue, ended with her asking to read the manuscript. About six weeks later she called him: "I love this book, and I want to buy the world rights to it." The Blackhouse appeared first in French. It came out in English in 2011, the year it won France's Cezam readers' prize, and in 2013 it took the Barry Award for best novel in the United States. May had meant it as a standalone and resisted a series, noting that on Lewis "the average murder rate there is one a century." His publishers kept asking, and The Lewis Man and The Chessmen completed the trilogy.

The road to that moment was long, and he changed direction often. "Making your life rich is all about changing it when it becomes too comfortable or predictable," he told the Los Angeles Review of Books. Born in Glasgow on December 20, 1951, the son of an English teacher and a mother he described as "a manic reader," he wrote and sewed together his first little book at the age of four. He played in a band from 11, and turning up late to school straight from gigs, long-haired and oddly dressed, ended his schooling. His headmaster, he recalled to The Guardian, told him: "May, take your long hair and your big furry coat and go home and don't come back." At 17 he and his bandmates ran away to London, busked in the Underground, and came back to Glasgow a month later, an episode he turned into the 2015 novel Runaway.

Journalism was his first way of being paid for words. He was named Scotland's Young Journalist of the Year at 21 and worked night shifts in the newsroom of The Scotsman. His first novel, The Reporter, was published when he was 26, and after the BBC adapted it he left newspapers for television. He created the BBC dramas The Standard and Squadron, wrote and script-edited the Scottish serial Take the High Road, and with Hally co-created Machair, the first major drama serial made in Gaelic, which he also produced. Its location shoots on Lewis, his publisher said, were where his love of the Hebrides took hold.

He quit television in 1996 to write novels full time. The Firemaker opened a series of China thrillers pairing the Beijing detective Li Yan with a Chicago forensic pathologist, Margaret Campbell, researched over repeated trips during which police in Beijing and Shanghai let him into their homicide and forensic science units. Chinese crime writers made him an honorary member of their association. "If we go to Shanghai, people are on the Bund and we're in the morgue and sitting in the forensics department," he said of his research travels with Hally. In 2002 he settled for good in the Lot, the corner of southwest France he had first found by accident on a 1978 campervan holiday, and in April 2016 he became a French citizen. The French media, he wrote, went from calling him the "most French of Scotsmen" to the "most Scottish of Frenchmen."

British prizes came later. When Entry Island won the Deanston Scottish Crime Book of the Year in 2014, he said it was the first literary award any of his books had won in the UK, and that it made him "immensely proud to be honoured by my ain folk in this way." In 2020 another shelved manuscript found its hour. Lockdown, a thriller about London sealed off by a pandemic, had been rejected as too unrealistic when he wrote it in 2005; it was published as the coronavirus kept millions at home. When a fan asked him for a novel about the moment, "I thought about it for a minute before I realized that I've kind of already done it," he told CNN.

Librarians voted him the Crime Writers' Association's Dagger in the Library in 2021. In 2024 he returned to the characters of the Lewis Trilogy with The Black Loch, which won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière the following year, and in 2025 he released a CD, Towards the Light, whose songs reflected many of his interests as a novelist. He had announced his retirement, but Jon Riley, his longtime publisher and friend, said May found there was one more novel in him. He delivered Island of the Dead in July 2026 and was preparing a farewell tour of Scotland and Lewis for its publication in January 2027.

"Peter May was not only one of the best writers of crime fiction we had, but he inspired enormous affection in his readers and in those lucky enough to work with him," Riley said. Éditions du Rouergue, the house that published The Blackhouse first, called him "a man of raw sensitivity, profoundly empathetic, considerate, and endlessly kind," and Scotland's First Minister, John Swinney, said he had "hugely enjoyed Peter May's evocative books set in the Hebrides."

What he leaves is some 30 novels and a map of real places, because he refused to write about anywhere he had not been. There is Fin Macleod's Lewis, down to the annual guga hunt; the Beijing and Shanghai of Li Yan and Margaret Campbell; Enzo Macleod's Cahors, where his first-floor flat overlooks the market hall May first wandered into in 1978. There are the 99 episodes of Machair, a Gaelic serial that ran in prime time on Scottish television. And there is one book still to arrive, Island of the Dead, the novel he found in himself after he had meant to stop.