Dr James Mackay was an award-winning author and historian, and was widely regarded as the world's greatest authority on the life and works of Robert Burns. As well as his definitive biography, Burns, winner of the Saltire Award for Scottish Book of the Year, he published accounts of the lives of the great Scottish patriot William Wallace and the Irish statesman Michael Collins. He was also the author of biographies of the celebrated detective Allan Pinkerton (The Eye Who Never Slept), the poet Robert Service (Vagabond of Verse) and Alexander Graham Bell (Sounds Out of Silence).