May won the Scottish Young Journalist of the Year Award at the age of 21. His first novel was published when he was 26 and went on to become a major BBC TV drama series. As a result, May left journalism and began writing television drama.
By the age of 30 he had created two major TV series for the BBC and went on to garner more than 1000 TV credits in 15 years, becoming one of Scotland's most successful TV writers, creating and writing prime-time drama.
As script editor and scriptwriter for Take The High Road, he guided it through its most successful era, regularly topping the viewing charts in Scotland with an audience of 6 million viewers across the UK.
In the 1990s, he co-created the ground-breaking Machair, the first ever major drama serial in the Gaelic language, which he also produced, described by reviewer Kenneth Roy as:
"quite simply the best thing to have happened to television in Scotland for a long time."
Machair achieved a 30% audience share and made it into the Top Ten of programmes viewed in Scotland.

Award-Winning China Thrillers
With the approach of the new millennium, May quit television to return to his first love, novels, and embarked on a series of thrillers which took him half-way across the world. Peter May made annual trips to China, spending months at a time there, building an extraordinary network of contacts.
He gained unprecedented access to the homicide and forensic science sections of Beijing and Shanghai police forces and made a painstaking study of the methodology of Chinese detectives and pathologists.
His outstanding China Thrillers series of books, featuring Beijing detective Li Yan and Forensic patholigist from Chicago, Margaret Campbell are now published worldwide. The books have been short-listed in France for Elle Magazine's Best Crime Novel in 2005 and the Prix Polar International in 2008. In 2007 Snakehead won the Prix Intramuros.

Member of Chinese Crime Writers Association
As a mark of their respect for his work, Chinese Crime Writers in the Beijing Chapter, made Peter an Honorary Member of The Chinese Crime Writers' Association. He is the only Westerner to receive such an honour.

Critical Acclaim for "cerebral" Enzo Files
His latest series of books, The Enzo Files, is set in France. Hailed by author Steve Berry as "intelligent... and ingenious", several reviewers have praised the cerebral nature of the cold case investigations tackled by the Scottish forensic scientist Enzo Macleod. Realism and humour also feature and the endearingly flawed hero has deen described as "a cross between James Bond and Inspector Clouseau".

Research and Factual Accuracy
May only writes about settings and locations that he has actually visited personally and continues to take his research seriously for the series set in France. Just as research for the China Thrillers meant trips to places such as the Shanghai police morgue and the American Ambassador's residence in Beijing, research for the Enzo Files has taken him from the Paris sewers to Michelin 3-star restaurants (he recently gained access to the kitchen of France's top chef, Michel Bras, to spend three days shadowing him in his work).

Chevalier de l'Ordre de la Dive Bouteille
The second in the Enzo Files series, The Critic, tells a story set in the world of French wine production. After picking grapes by hand, studying the process of wine-making from vine to marketing, and taking a formal wine tasting course. May was inducted as a Chevalier de l'Ordre de la Dive Bouteille de Gaillac.

Professional Private Eye
In search of a new setting for his 2010 thriller, Virtually Dead, May entered the virtual world of Second Life in 2007, setting up a detective agency in order to research. His avatar handled dozens of Second Life investigations for real (paying) clients enabling May to gather invaluable background and insights for his book.

Background to May's Latest Work: The Lewis Trilogy
The Blackhouse is the first of three books planned to be set on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.
For five years in the 1990s, as producer and creator of the drama serial, Machair, May was in charge of a 70-strong cast and crew living and working on the island.
The landscape and the life there had a profound effect on May and have provided the inspiration for his Lewis Trilogy.

The Blackhouse
"The Blackhouse is a crime novel of rare power and vision.
It is a murder mystery that explores the shadows in our souls,
set in a place where the past is ever near the surface,
and life blurs into myth and history."
(cover copy)
The Blackhouse was first published in France as L'Ile des Chasseurs d'Oiseaux and won Les Ancres Noires Prix des Lecteurs at Le Havre in 2010. It has been nominated for two other French book awards due to be announced in October 2010.
The Blackhouse will be published in the UK and around Europe in 2011.