Gunner - Alan Parks

 I've been a big fan of Parks' Harry McCoy series of crime thrillers.   Now he has opened a second strand with Joe Gunner, and I am equally enthused (with one reservation.

Let's get the reservation out of the way first.   WHATEVER HAPPENED TO PROOF READING?   The first blooper I can live with.   Anyone can make a mistake.   Trade fares instead of trade fairs (p. 15).   But the second!   The OIC at the POW camp switches between Corporal and Colonel several times in the same scene, sometimes even the same paragraph.   And to make matters worse, it happens again in his second appearance, more than a hundred pages later.   Did we proof read this AI?   Yes I suspect we did.   And Baskerville, a division of the legendary John Murray, publishers of Lord Byron, charge libraries £16.99 for this?

Rant over, Parks hits the spot with this wartime crime thriller.   Joe Gunner left Glasgow polis for the war, only to be evacuated, badly injured, from Dunkirk.   Now he has been sent home to recuperate - only to find his old boss, DI Malcolm Drummond waiting for him at the station.   "I need your help with a body, Joe."

Glasgow police have been hit hard by the outbreak of war.   Gunner was by no means the only one to enlist in September 1939.   Eighteen months in (March 1941) the force is reduced to old timers plucked out of retirement and auxilliaries like Drummond's aide Fraser Lockhart.    Organised crime has flourished and there's a secondary war about to break out between the main crime families, the McGills and the Sellars brothers.

Drummond knows that Joe is unlikely to be recalled to military service with his injuries.   He wants him back in the polis, deploying his exceptional skills as a detective and covering for the DI and all his side scams.   Gunnar wants his freedom - he offers to help for a day or two, no more.

Fat chance.   Gunnar is soon up to his neck in a multiple murder mystery involving spies, POWs, conscientious objectors, and more.   Joe's younger brother is one of conchies (or is he?), not on religious grounds but because he is pro-Russia, and Russia in March 1941 were still in a non-aggression pact with Hitler.   The ending was absolutely brilliant - Parks led me completely down the proverbial garden path.   The characters and concept are both standout and I can't wait for the next in the series. 

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.

The Dark Remains - William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

 On the face of it, The Dark Remains is an unexpected treat, an unfinished novel by the pioneer of Tartan Noir completed by the master of the form.  In reality it falls below the average of either.  The story itself has potential: the murder of a front man for one of the local gangs threatens to spark a turf war in 1972, when Glasgow was still dying on its hind quarters.

It is perfectly readable, obviously, but there is a conspicuous lack of darkness, the mordant black humour for which both McIlvanney and Rankin were known in their heyday, even credible violence.  The names of the characters - Carter, Thompson - seem like placeholders for something better.  I didn't figure out who the murderer was, but then I rarely do.  I was neither surprised nor especially interested when it was revealed.  There is an tagged-on episode in which the stirrer-up of the turf war gets his comeuppance.  I had forgotten who he was, which in a large print novel of less than 300 pages read over two consecutive days is not good.

It's trivial footnote to a significant career.  There was a reason McIlvanney left it unfinished.  Rankin can still deliver a good novel but it's all about retirement these days, the older man looking back.  Canongate would have done better to get Stuart Macbride or one of the younger lions to work on Dark Remains (which is also a poor title, having nothing to do with the plot).

The Long Glasgow Kiss (Revisited) - Craig Russell

Well, it had to happen.  Sooner or later I was going to read a book I'd read before and forgotten all about.  Now is that time.  Below is what I wrote back in January 2014.

"The second novel in Russell's 'Lennox' series sees the eponymous Canadian gumshoe chasing a Vietnamese Dragon (as opposed to a Maltese Falcon) round the extremely mean streets of early 1950s Glasgow.  Lennox is a brilliant idea - modern Tartan Noir with a hero straight out of 1940s US cinema noir.  One criticism: not having read the first, I was some way in before I realised it was supposed to be 1953-4.  Once I realised, though, I was hooked.  Russell works all the classic tropes - rival gangs, women of dubious virtue, boxing - and comes up trumps.  I didn't guess the final twist and that's all you really need from a detective plot.  There are now four in the series, and I'll be reading them all."

Well I haven't read any more.  In fact when I was reading this the second time I knew I'd encountered Lennox before and thought I must have read the first, albeit references to it here didn't trigger any memories.  It's still a good read.  This time through I did guess the denouement but there's probably a reason for that.  And albeit I found the writing a little sloppy for my eight-years-more-mature taste, I would still be perfectly happy to read others in the series - but hopefully not this one for a third time!

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.

Good & A Nightingale Sang... - C P Taylor

C P Taylor was a Glaswegian Jewish Marxist autodidact playwright who lived and worked in Newcastle and who died ridiculously young in 1981. He was only in his early fifties yet had written some 80 plays for stage, TV and radio, in just 20 years.

Good is his masterpiece, a last-minute breakthrough onto the national stage when the RSC staged it  in London just three months before Taylor's death. It is an examination of the axiom generally attributed to Edmund Burke: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Halder is a good man, a university professor who supports his scatterbrained wife and dutifully visits his senile mother in the nursing home. But this is Germany 1933 and the Nazis are on the rise. Halder is dismissive, even mildly subversive. He has a Jewish friend, the psychiatrist Maurice, and a taste for 'degenerate' American-style jazz.


No doubt influenced by his mother's distressing condition, Halder has written a book which can be read as advocating euthanasia. This attracts the attention of Nazi racial purists. They make overtures to Halder, gradually drawing him into their circle. He initially resists, but as time goes on his qualms are overridden by the need to earn a living. His mother is now back living with him, his wife is even more hopeless about the house, and Haldane has started an affair with one of his female students. The Nazis understand these things. They are supportive, even seductive. Slowly, Halder starts to distance himself from his friend Maurice...


Taylor had made himself a master of open staging through his association with studio theatres like the Traverse in Glasgow and the Live Theatre Company in Newcastle. He also worked in community drama, and thus was able to handle large casts and overlapping scenes. Good is a fine example of both disciplines. Halder is onstage almost all the time, accompanied by a live jazz band (a very Taylorean device). The other characters effectively come to him. Very unusually, several scenes overlap, with Haldane switching in and out of conversations with different people in different locations and even at significantly different times. Only a writer at the height of his game could pull this off and it takes a very special actor to accomplish it onstage. The late great Alan Howard, a consummate stage actor and the best Hamlet I have ever seen, created the role in London and New York.


If Good is Taylor's take on Brechtian Epic Theatre, the other play in this Methuen edition deploys many of the same techniques on a more domestic scale. And a Nightingale Sang... (1977) is the story of the working class Stott family of Newcastle, from the day World War II broke out (September 3 1939) to VE Day (May 8 1945). Although the action primarily takes place in the family home, it instantly moves elsewhere (chiefly the bench in Eldon Square where lame spinster Helen meets her married lover Norman for illicit purposes). There are times when two things are happening simultaneously, as when Eric is waiting nervously in the parlour while the women are upstairs with Joyce, trying to persuade her to come down and be proposed to. George Stott, the father, bangs away on the upright piano - all the popular songs - while Mam Peggy consoles herself with Catholicism and Peggy's father Andie wanders from one daughter's house to the other, starting with his dead whippet in a bag and ending up hiding from the amorous widow who wants to marry him.


It's a dialect play - a dialect I have always known and liked, though I daresay it limited the play's chances in the South back in Taylor's lifetime. We are now used to the device of setting a scene (and, better, underscoring the action) with period popular music, but it should be noted that A Nightingale Sang... preceded Dennis Potter's Pennies From Heaven by a full year. There is much more breaking down of the fourth wall in Nightingale than in Good, and appropriately so, given that so much of what we hear is Helen's personal inner life. The final scene, in which she dances, not with faithless Norman who has scurried home to mother and wife in the Midlands, but with Joyce's rapscallion hubbie Eric, features both soliloquy and music - the Nightingale finally does dance - and it is heartbreaking.


Not being active in the business these days, I have no real way of assessing where Taylor's reputation stands today. Wherever, it should be higher. I have other plays of his about the house, collected while he was still alive and writing. I must look them out.

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.

Truth Dare Kill - Gordon Ferris

Ferris sets his crime thrillers in the immediate postwar period, when everything was still rationed but already people were starting to wonder how we could have won against the odds and yet seemingly lost everything.  His Douglas Brodie quartet is set in Glasgow, whereas Danny McRae is a private eye in London.  Otherwise, the two protagonists are much too similar - born in Ayrshire poverty, both ex-Glasgow coppers, both elevated to rank in the war, both damaged by the experience.  To be fair, McRae is much more damaged.  He was an SOE operative captured by the Germans and beaten to within an inch of his life.  As a result he is visibly and mentally scarred.  He has lost an entire year of memory and suffers crushing headaches during which he loses days and suffers all sorts of visions.  During these episodes, who knows what he gets up to?

A rare paying client sucks him to a dark family secret which also opens a door onto his own past.  Further than that, it wouldn't be fair to go, because Ferris revels in tangled webs for his plots.  On that score, I will content myself by saying, the final twist is an absolute stunner which I, for one, did not suspect.

Otherwise, Ferris writes well, very well.  His characters, male and female, are equally interesting and fully rounded.  His research rings true.  I will certainly be on the lookout for the second McRae, The Unquiet Heart.

Bitter Water - Gordon Ferris

Yet another new Scottish crime writer, this time specialising in the latest sub-genre, post-WW2 Scottish crime.  Ferris has two strands on the go, a London series featuring Danny McRae, and a Glasgow series fearuring Douglas Brodie.  Bitter Water is the second Brodie; the fourth, Gallowglass, is due imminently.

Brodie has a great backstory which gives him access to crime.  He used to be a policeman, then he became an officer in the 51st Highland Regiment, one of the few to escape betrayal by French surrender monkeys at Caen - a subject which interests me greatly, and which is a key storyline here.  For this novel he has been taken on as a crime reporter at the Glasgow Gazette, clearly as a result of his adventures in the first of the series, The Hanging Shed.

Bitter Water is so heavily reliant on The Hanging Shed that there really should be a warning on the cover, saying read them in order.  Having read Bitter Water there can be no surprises in The Hanging Shed as everything, but everything is reiterated.  That's a mistake on Ferris's part.  It's cost him a sale in my case.  And it's a shame because I absolutely loved this book.  He seems to be spot on in his research.  There are bags and bags of period details to get our teeth into.  The story is complex and cleverly incorporates subjects of importance to us today, thus letting us empathise with characters who would have been reviled at the time.  And Ferris is very, very good at pace.  The action never flags, the denouement is pure thriller, and there is a revelation at the very end which justifies what I feared would be an overlong and unnecessary tying up of loose ends.

Highly recommended.

The Long Glasgow Kiss - Craig Russell

The second novel in Russell's 'Lennox' series sees the eponymous Canadian gumshoe chasing a Vietnamese Dragon (as opposed to a Maltese Falcon) round the extremely mean streets of early 1950s Glasgow.  Lennox is a brilliant idea - modern Tartan Noir with a hero straight out of 1940s US cinema noir.  One criticism: not having read the first, I was some way in before I realised it was supposed to be 1953-4.  Once I realised, though, I was hooked.  Russell works all the classic tropes - rival gangs, women of dubious virtue, boxing - and comes up trumps.  I didn't guess the final twist and that's all you really need from a detective plot.  There are now four in the series, and I'll be reading them all.

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.

Random - Craig Robertson

Craig Robertson, formerly of Scotland's Sunday Post cleverly puts the press at the heart of this, his first novel.  Just how cleverly, we don't realise until the very end.

Plotting is exceptional here.  It's a serial killer first-person narrative, never easy to do, and we are never told our protagonist's name (we get his surname, indirectly, again towards the end).  By incorporating the press reports, which the killer studies assiduously, we gain the indispensable counter-view.  Motivation is also a problem - most serial killers kill for kicks of one sort or another and Robertson has, after all, called his novel Random.  Again, superior plotting saves the day.  It's not the purpose of this blog to give the game away but, suffice to say, when we realise what our killer's motivation is, we start to empathise.

The writing itself is brisk, propulsive, and spiced with Glasgow dialect.  The book is consciously Tartan Noir - our killer is not the worst or most violent character involved - with the extra twist of some truly innovative means of murder.

My only criticism is that it goes on maybe thirty pages too long.  Some wrapping up of loose ends is essential but not the final denouement, which trips over the obstacle intrinsic in first-person narrative and which, in this instance, really isn't worth the risk.  In detective novels it is customary to restore the world to balance.  This, however, is a psycho killer novel and the world of our protagonist can never return to balance.

All the same, a brilliant debut - exceptional - and a writer to watch.