Queen Macbeth - Val McDermid

 Queen Macbeth is McDermid's contribution to Darkland Tales, the Polygon series of novellas that includes Denise Mina's Rizzio (also reviewed on this blog), in which leading Scottish writers of today offer a fresh take on Scottish history.

And Macbeth is history, though many people seem to think Shakespeare made him up.   And his wife was a significant person, so significant that her name survives a thousand years later.   Her name was Gruoch.   She was of royal Pictish blood and thus forced into an advantageous marriage to the Mormaer of Moray.   Macbeth freed her from that marriage - by burning her husband and his warband in their hall.   He then took over, uniting the various sub-kingdoms and formed a version of what is now Scotlnnd.   He was a benign ruler, it is said, and even went on pilgrimage to Rome.

McDermid starts with the facts and does a cracking job of bringing us into Gruoch's world.   Again wisely and well, she uses the framing device long advocated for novellas.   The present is after Macbeth's death in battle; Gruoch and her women have found sanctuary in a remote abbey, but Malcolm Canmore has defeated and killed the new king, Gruoch's son Lulach, and is said to be coming for her; so the women flee for the islands where Macbeth was always strong.   The past is how she and Macbeth first met and fell in love; how they plotted together to kill the Mormaer and how they then ruled Scotland together.

All this is first rate stuff, but then comes the twist - and it didn't work at all for me.   Goethe, who largely created the novella in its modern form, described it as "one authentic unheard-of event" - but there are limits.

Three Fires - Denise Mina

 In many ways Three Fires (2023) is the companion piece to Mina's brilliant Rizzio (2021).   Both, obviously, are novellas published by Polygon.   Both take historical incidents and view them through a contemporary lens.   Three Fires is less immediately engaging.   Its hero, the 15th century Florentine mystic dictator Girolamo Savonarola is clearly less appealing than the (probably) innocent French secretary.   Political murder, in the latter case, is more exciting than a renegade preacher ultimately brought down by hubris.  That said, both are compelling reads - Mina couldn't write boring sentence if she tried.   And she manages to drag out every shred of humanity in Savonarola.   He starts off indifferent to God, then personal setbacks lead him to find God.   He genuinely believes God speaks to him, then he begins to doubt, and the doubts quickly lead to his gruesome death.

The novella is the perfect form for Mina's purpose.   Many have tried and failed to spin the Rizzio story into full-length novels.   Such attempts fail because poor old Rizzio was collateral damage in a political powerplay which happened behind closed doors in Tudor times but today are everyday public fare.   In that sense Savonarola plays better because he is definitely responsible for his own rise and fall.   The canvas is bigger, the protagonist centrestage.  

I for one am really enjoying Mina's mid-career experiments.

The Second Murderer - Denise Mina

 The Second Murderer is a Philip Marlowe novel.   Yes, that Philip Marlowe, the Raymond Chandler one, continued by the fabulous Denise Mina.   It is, unsurprisingly, fabulous.   Mina does not put a foot wrong in recreating the mean streets of LA, the Forties repartee, the tone of the original.   Tone is the key, because Chandler was a lot more cutting in his moral judgments than most people remember.

I've read at least one other Marlowe continuation, the one where he comes out of retirement, but Mina is wise to stick to the Forties.  This is because she is so damn good at establishing period.  I thought her Rizzio was superb and am looking to pick up her Savanarola take, Three Fires.   It doesn't have to be half a millennium ago for Mina, her Peter Manuel novel, The Long Drop, was equally convincing.

Here, Marlowe is summoned by an evil millionaire to track down his errant daughter and sole heiress.   Marlowe finds her dabbling on the art scene - acting as guide for an Abstract Expressionist exhibition for a gallerist who is a brilliant amalgam of Peggy Guggenheim and Big Edie Bouvier in Grey Gardens (and she's just a walk-on character).   From there Marlowe is drawn to the Lesbian scene.   He is in conflict and unofficial partnership with female detective Anne Riordan whose advances, professional and personal, he has previously spurned, and butts heads with Moochie Ruud, rising star of the LAPD thanks to marrying the boss's unappealling daughter.

Key to the book's success is Mina's ability to pull off Chandler's trick - the murder and who did it is only the device that brings the characters together.   It doesn't matter who dies or who did it.   I only finished reading yesterday morning and I have already forgotten who did it.   Interestingly I do remember who the titular second murderer was, but never guessed whilst reading.   Brilliant, I do hope Mina writes more Marlowe.

The Long Drop - Denise Mina

 The Long Drop is Mina's take on Peter Manuel, hanged in 1958 and probably Scorland's worst serial killer.   He was convicted of two family murders (that is to say, twice, for little or no reason, wiping out every member of two unconnected households) and a couple of sex-murders of vulnerable young women.

Initially, the husband-father of the first household, a fairly prominent Glasgow businessman, was suspected and imprisoned.   He got out and, bizarrely, conducted his own investigations, finding Manuel who had written three letters to the businessman's solicitor saying he knew who had done it.   The solicitor always suspected Manuel had done it - how else could he know the details of the house, down to the brand of sherry in the drinks cabinet?   The businessman, William Watt, insists on meeting Manuel.   They go on a truly surreal alcoholic bender, from the posh business bars to the threshold of the Cot, a dive so seedy, naked women serve the drinks.   Throughout they are being sought by representatives of Glasgow's underworld.   The gangsters are seeking both Peter Manuel and William Watt.   Why both?

Interspersed with this, Mina recreates the trial of Manuel.   TRhe Scottish court process is slightly different from the English.   I recently watched a documentary of an actual Scottish murder trial, so some of the anomalies had been cleared up for me (for example, advocate-depute).   But what I saw was a 2023 trial, so it didn't have the final, stunning twist, the judge donning a black tricorne hat and uttering the final, bone-chilling formula.   English and Welsh judges ended with "So help you God."   The Scottish ending knocks that, literally, into a cocked hat.

Dina's storytelling is, of course, superb.   I have never read a bad book by her, something I cannot say for any of her peers in Scottish crime writing.   She has chosen to write in present tense, which I always think works perfectly for true crime.   Where she excels is in taking us into the mind of the two principal men.   Watt is respectable but a wrong 'un.   Manuel could not be further from a right 'un.   He is so monstrous, there simply has to be a mental defect.   Mina portrays him as psychotic.   He can be charming, he always talks more than he should, but he does not get the reactions of other people.   He loves his mum.   He does what he is told.

A brilliant read, masterfully done.

Rizzio - Denise Mina

 

Polygon have launched Darkland Tales, retelling of Scottish history from contemporary Scottish authors.   Rizzio, by the fabulous Denise Mina, is the first.   It is very short - 117 pages in big, well-spaced print - and it is breathtakingly good.   Mina revels in the artifice of it all, cutting to and fro through the limited timescale and describing her characters with cool detachment.  The whole episode is a sort of pageant, albeit deeply brutal and, as all readers will know, ultimately pointless.

It introduces me, not especially versed in Scottish history, to people like Lord Ruthven, roused from his deathbed to lead the conspirators.   The first question everyone asks him is, "What are you wearing?"   Then there is Lennox, whose descent I knew about but not his personality.   He is apparently the most hated and distrusted peer in Scotland, which is some going considering he is the father of the appalling Darnley.   The standout character is probably Henry Yair, a Calvinist conspirator and thug who is unhinged by the slaughter of Rizzio and finds hunself standing over the body of a murdered priest.

Mina is right to cut her tale short with Queen Mary's escape from Holyrood.   We don't need to explore what happened after.   That is another story.

A Presumption of Innocence - Ludovic Kennedy

 

Last month I read and reviewed Denise Mina's Field of Blood.  The heroine of that novel was Paddy Meehan, taking her nickname from the real victim of a famous Scottish miscarriage of justice from 1969 which I had never heard of.  This surprised me: miscarriages of justice were already a keen interest of mine at the time (mainly prompted by the Guilford Four).  Naturally I had to find out and I knew from Mina that it was one of Ludovic Kennedy's crusades, which I first learned about around 1969-70 when they made the movie of 10 Rillington Place.

So, inevitably, I hit ebay and got myself a copy of A Presumption of Innocence.

Now, this paperback is an updated edition issued after Meehan was pardoned.  I may yet feel obliged to try and access the original, because the only reason Meehan got pardoned was because of the furore caused by Kennedy's book.  Things in the original that can only have been conjecture appear here as fact (which they might not be, given that Meehan was pardoned, not exonerated at appeal) and any leads which led nowhere have probably been excised.  One of the latter, I suspect, is Meehan's frankly bizarre claim that he - a Glaswegian safe cracker - had been a spy in East Germany, which is reduced here to a frankly meaningless stub.  To be even franker, this paperback was obviously a rushed job issued to capitalise on Meehan's brief moment of fame, and it shows.

Meat cleaver editing, however, cannot hide the facts of the case, which are truly alarming.  Meehan effectively put himself in the frame by ringing the police with information about the murder of Mrs Ross in Ayr in July 1969.  Mrs Ross's husband, who survived, said the attackers called themselves Pat and Jim.  Meehan's story was that he had been out of town sizing up a proposed crime in Stranraer with a friend and fellow criminal who just happened to be called Jim.  On the way back to Glasgow in the early hours he thought he might have come across the Ross killers, hence the call.  He didn't actually give his mate's full name because Jim Griffiths was on the run.  It took the police only hours to find out who he was - resulting in an armed siege in which Griffiths was killed by police. having shot and killed one officer and injuring several more.  Thus Meehan eventually stood trial with a dead man whose record could be revealed to the jury.  This tended to obscure the fact that Mr Abraham Ross, himself Glasgow born, was sure his attackers both had Glasgow accents whereas Jim Griffiths was from Lancashire and had a strong Northern accent.

Kennedy infers that the police rigged Meehan's identity parade and planted incriminating evidence in Griffiths' car coat after his death.  This might have come out at appeal and caused a scandal - hence the pardon.

Meehan had, however, spent seven years in prison by the time the book came out and had used up all his appeals.  One of the grounds of appeal - and one of his lines of defence at the original trial - was that someone else had killed Mrs Ross.  Not the usual person unknown but a named individual, Ian Waddell, who (unbelievably) was a defence witness at the trial and who (not the sharpest knife in the box) had regularly confessed to the Press over the years since.

Given all that, I still cannot understand why Paddy Meehan hasn't become a byword for police malice and injustice south of the Border.  I can't find anyone (and as a member of the judiciary I know a number of the right people) who has even heard of the case.  An armed siege in the centre of a major city in which policemen are shot at?  Imagine if that had been London, Manchester, Birmingham or indeed anywhere in England!  Remember for example the wall-to-wall coverage of Harry Roberts, four or five years before Griffiths.

It's a must-read if you are at all interested in the justice system - but make sure you get a first edition.

Field of Blood - Denise Mina

 

Field of Blood is the first in the Paddy Meehan series.  Paddy is really Patricia but is known as Paddy because of the real Glasgow hardman who was a famous victim of injustice in the 1960s and 70s.  Mina tells us in the afterword that her mother arranged for her to meet him when she was starting out as a journalist.

It is 1981 and the female Paddy is also starting out as a journalist, albeit she is currently just on the copyboy bench.  Colleagues start to take notice when Baby Brian is found on the rail tracks and Paddy's fiance's cousin is arrested for his murder.  The cousin and his accomplice are both boys themselves.  The echoes of Jamie Bulger are obvious.

Paddy starts to investigate and soon forms the impression that an adult was also involved, and that adult controlled the kids.  At this point - slightly late for my liking - the story really takes off.  Paddy is put in real jeopardy before the end.  Everything is credible and logical.  My only reservations are there was slightly too much time spent on Paddy's Catholic background - although, her escape from convention is a key part of her character development - and the Meehan material was not really worth the trouble.  Perhaps Mina takes it further in subsequent novels in the series.

I am already a big fan of Mina.  I consider this not to be her best novel, largely because in other books she has set a higher standard.  It is still a cracking good read.

Garnethill - Denise Mina

Garnethill (1999) is the first of Mina's series of the same name featuring ex-mental patient and abuse survivor Maureen O'Donnell. It is also her first novel, though you'd never guess.


Maureen has decided to end her relationship with Douglas, a therapist from her mental health clinic. She gets terrifically drunk one night, rolls home to her flat in Garnethill, and wakes next morning to find Douglas in her living room, his head hanging off and something deeply unpleasant hidden in her hall cupboard. Obviously Maureen is prime suspect - if not her, the police reason, then her drug dealer brother Liam.


Despite her somewhat addled memories of the evening in question, Maureen is confident she didn't do it. The police don't seem to be listening, so she investigates herself, sometimes with Liam's assistance, more often with Lesley, her biker pal from the women's refuge. Liam aside, she gets no support from the rest of her family, who initially assume she did it during one of her mental episodes. Maureen's mother Winnie is a colourful alkie. Maureen's sisters are both upwardly mobile, loving but with no idea about their younger siblings. Their father has long since disappeared, following young Maureen's allegations of abuse.


The plot is complex but held together, more or less, by the theme of abuse - sexual, physical, official. Even dead Douglas gets involved by leaving Maureen an appreciable amount of money as some sort of compensation. To say any more about the story would be to give too much away. The writing is of a very high standard, the tone - enlivened here and there by the grim Glaswegian humour - is spot on. The characters - those within Maureen's ambit, anyway - are fully rounded and very human in their instability. Perhaps the antagonists could do with a touch more development; circumstances got in the way of me posting this review yesterday, having finished it the evening before, and I had to take a moment to remember who killed Douglas and why, and I still can't remember the character's name.


That's my only criticism. I loved Garnethill. Sadly, it transpires I read the second in the series, Exile, back in 2015 and reviewed it here. Turns out I didn't like it as much as I liked Garnethill. Still, there's always Resolution.

[Previously posted on this blog.]

Exile is the second of Mina's 'Garnethill' trilogy. The first, not surprisingly, is Garnethill.  The heroine, Maureen, is a damaged, abused young woman with a drug-dealing brother - not unlike Alex Morrow in the later novels.  The setting would seem to be Glasgow, as it should be in Tartan Noir, but actually about half the book takes place in London, which is a tremendous mistake, especially since the people Maureen mixes with there, even the copper with the Met who eventually listens to her, are Glaswegian,

It's a second novel which Mina made doubly hard for herself as the second in a series.  One of Mina's themes is that Scottish women have traditionally been abused by their men.  She wants to say that oppression has made them strong and feisty, a positive message.  Sadly, she undermines herself at every turn, because two of the sleaziest baddies are women and all the white knights who ride to Maureen's rescue are men - Scottish men, at that.

Exile is highly readable.  It is well plotted but, in this Orion paperback, poorly proof-read.  There are far too many characters, especially the ill-defined secondary women, and I often had to pause and wonder who is this when they reappeared much later.  There is one exception, though - Kilty Goldfarb, a great fun character who has no real purpose and has apparently just been plonked in the story to add some much needed light.  Or perhaps I was beguiled by the fact that she has the name of a well known firm of solicitors in Leicester West, now I believe defunct.  Spooky, eh?

In summary, not Mina's best by a long chalk (for me, that remains The End of the Wasp Season) but still better than many of its peers.

Exile - Denise Mina

Exile is the second of Mina's 'Garnethill' trilogy. The first, not surprisingly, is Garnethill.  The heroine, Maureen, is a damaged, abused young woman with a drug-dealing brother - not unlike Alex Morrow in the later novels.  The setting would seem to be Glasgow, as it should be in Tartan Noir, but actually about half the book takes place in London, which is a tremendous mistake, especially since the people Maureen mixes with there, even the copper with the Met who eventually listens to her, are Glaswegian,

It's a second novel which Mina made doubly hard for herself as the second in a series.  One of Mina's themes is that Scottish women have traditionally been abused by their men.  She wants to say that oppression has made them strong and feisty, a positive message.  Sadly, she undermines herself at every turn, because two of the sleaziest baddies are women and all the white knights who ride to Maureen's rescue are men - Scottish men, at that.

Exile is highly readable.  It is well plotted but, in this Orion paperback, poorly proof-read.  There are far too many characters, especially the ill-defined secondary women, and I often had to pause and wonder who is this when they reappeared much later.  There is one exception, though - Kilty Goldfarb, a great fun character who has no real purpose and has apparently just been plonked in the story to add some much needed light.  Or perhaps I was beguiled by the fact that she has the name of a well known firm of solicitors in Leicester West, now I believe defunct.  Spooky, eh?

In summary, not Mina's best by a long chalk (for me, that remains The End of the Wasp Season) but still better than many of its peers.

The Red Road - Denise Mina

Tartan Noir, I suppose, really began with Val McDermid, who in turn built on the work of Ian Rankin and especially William McIlvanney.  There are so many practitioners now - MacBride, Black, Ferris - that there even sub-genres.  But Denise Mina has to be up there with the very best, purely because she manages to maintain such a high standard.

I have to confess that my heart sank when I realised that The Red Road was going to keep switching the narrative between 1997 and the present day.  But the writing was so good, so clever, that it kept me reading, and then when I came upon the central hook (which I obviously can't reveal here) I was well and truly caught.  The mark of a writer not trapped by genre is the roundedness of characters.  Do they live or do they just perform.  Agatha Christie and many more rely entirely on their protagonists in this regard.  Mina's protagonist, DI Alex Morrow, on the other hand, is a bit dull, even prosaic.  Mina turns this to advantage by making the transitory characters Morrow comes in contact with vivid, even spectacular.  For example in The Red Road we have the drunken peer and barrister Anton Atholl, and the superannuated hippy Simon.  Even her scrotes are three-dimensional.  Take Michael Brown, the dying lifer, whose entire existence has been stolen from him.  To make us empathise with him takes writing of the very highest order.

Highly recommended.

Cold Granite - Stuart MacBride

This is it, the first of the Logan McRae series.  Well, I say first.  Certainly it is the first to be published - it is, indeed, MacBride's first published book - but the sheer amount of backstory here makes it clear to me that there was an earlier, unpublished attempt.  No doubt whilst hawking that round publishers MacBride wrote a successor, Cold Granite, which was accepted, helped, probably, by the amount of backstory.

Anyhow, it's a thumpingly good start, an assured welcome to the world of Grampian Police.  Logan is back on duty a year after having his guts perforated by a serial killer he captured.  This is why they call him Laz, because he is Lazarus back from the dead.  The day starts badly.  The mutilated body of a small boy have been found.  Things spiral downhill from there.  DI Steel is otherwise engaged, so Laz is assigned to DI Insch, he of the temper and the sweeties.  The pathologist is Laz's ex, Isobel.  The newshound harrying McRae for the inside track is the new-in-town Colin Miller.

There are other magnificent writers of Scottish crime fiction - Rankin, McDermid, Mina (whose just won an award for her latest) - and all crime fiction is to a greater or lesser extent noir, but MacBride is far and away the most accomplished purveyor of Tartan Noir as a specific genre, and with Cold Granite established himself as such from Day One.

The End of the Wasp Season - Denise Mina

Another in the DS Alex Morrow series, this one disappointed me slightly.  Firstly, because Morrow is in a happy place, heavily pregnant with twins and sorely lacking her accustomed belligerence.  Secondly, because the murder is all about rich folks and thus I find it hard to empathise.  To be fair, Mina is making a social point about the working poor, the fading gentry and super-rich financial swindlers.  For me, however, the dividing lines weren't stark enough.

That said, Mina still writes like a dream, with a gift for inhabiting the souls of even of her most transitory characters. I enjoyed the book but I didn't love it.  And my enjoyment wasn't helped by piss-poor proof-reading.  It's no wonder hard copy publishers are losing ground to e-publishing.  You'd forgive the misprints in a book that costs you under £2, but not one that costs £12.99.

Still Midnight - Denise Mina

Denise Mina is often grouped with Tartan Noir novelists like Stuart MacBride and Tony Black.  She is Scottish and much of her work is crime fiction (she even has degrees in law and crime), but I would suggest a more suitable grouping of contemporary Scottish crime writing.  There is nothing especially noir about Still Midnight, the first of her DS Alex Morrow series.  Instead it is a story about the modern urban family.

Two pumped-up nutters carry out a ham-fisted home invasion on the Anwars' bungalow.  One accidentally blows sixteen year old Aleesha's hand off.  The other grabs paterfamilias Aamir, not the intended target, and bundles him into the van.  Later, he demands £2 million ransom.  Aamar runs a hole-in-the-wall newsagent's for a clientele of alkies and addicts; unless the family has a dodgy sideline, there's no way they can access money like that.

Alex Morrow has her own family secrets - her gangster father and half-brother, the domestic tragedy in her own homelife.  Her proxy family of the police service is likewise dysfunctional.  Her professional father, DI MacKechnie, favours her 'sibling' DS Bannerman, who is smug, self-satisfied and destined for higher things.

Then there is a third family, the gangland Tait clan, who it turns out have significant links.

It is all expertly handled.  The writing is shrewdly judged, always appropriate, handling difficult issues like race without either patronising or sermonising.  Even the happy(ish) ending, which would have jarred horribly if this really was Tartan Noir, succeeds because Mina has taken time to build her characters and make them all multi-faceted.

It is a bloody good read, and I want more.