The Papers of Tony Veitch - William McIlvanney

This is the second of McIlvanney's Laidlaw Trilogy, held by many to be the spring from which Tartan Noir flowed, though I credit the TV series Taggart equally.

McIlvanney is not a genre writer but an award-winning literary writer who found crime fiction as one way of expressing his preoccupations and interests.  Thus Veitch is not really a crime novel - it really doesn't matter who did what to whom.  It is a study of a once mighty city, brought to its knees by Mrs Thatcher, where the hard man has always been as well-regarded as the provost or the Rangers centre-forward.  Jack Laidlaw is as hard as any of villains he hunts down.  The plot drives the narrative but it is the language that makes it sing. Here are just a few of my favourites:

"A lot of the people he dealt with, Milligan thought, must have been home in bed before their self-congratulation went sour and they realised that Macey had been taking the mickey out of the mickey they thought they were taking out of him.  He was so simple he could have sold life insurance in heaven."

"Put a monkey in a toy uniform, Macey thought, and it will try to pull rank."

"She wis a kind wumman, mamither.  Woulda bought extra cheese if she'd knew there wis a moose in the hoose."

"It was a place so kind it would batter cruelty into the ground."

The original ... and in many ways the best.

Hard Truths is a short ebook of an interview with McIlvanney by the contemporary star of Tartan Noir, Tony Black.  It is actually a book of interviews with crime writers chopped up to flog separately on Kindle - a smart idea.  McIlvanney, still going strong at 77, has just got a new publisher, Canongate, who have republished all his work in smart new editions and as ebooks.

He says of Laidlaw, "A detective story, if you get it right you'll have a plot that's going to make people read on but along the way give them serious observation and a sense of the society the novel is passing through."  And of Tartan Noir, "I don't that it'll be the ultimate expression of Scottish culture, folk will come along and do more but I think it's great that there's an area where the value, the significance of the written word is appreciated."

The good news is that, more than twenty years since he finished the Laidlaw Trilogy, McIlvanney is toying with the notion of a prequel, "before he became quite so aggressive", and a "twilight" post-retirement Laidlaw.  We can but hope.

The Holy Father - Tony Black

 

This short, festive ebook showcases the other side of Black and demonstrates why he is so often compared to Irvine Welsh.  It's humour, and it's very, very black. It's Christmas Eve and underemployed carpenter Joe is visited by the late Rangers Wizard of the Wing, Davie Cooper.  Davie brings tidings from the Big Man: Joe's girlfriend Mary-doll is up the duff with the next messiah.  Davie's now got wings, so it must be true.

 

Joe and Mary duly trek across town following the star.  Along the way they encounter three not-so-wise jakeys who bring gifts of a sort.  It's laugh out loud funny on occasion, regularly rude, and perfectly suited to the short ebook form.  Any more and it would risk turning trite.

Long Time Dead - Tony Black

The fourth novel featuring down-at-heel ex-journo Gus Drury bestriding the meaner than expected streets of Edinburgh.  Having been so disappointed with the second DI Brennan novel (having loved the first), I remain a bigtime Dury fan.  With his chaotic lifestyle and choice social circle, he is perfect vehicle for Tartan Noir.  With his tragic back story of physical abuse from his football-hero father, he has the necessary weight to carry the flippancy.

The actual crime here is not especially interesting - the victim is almost Cameronesque in his unlikeability, and for the same reason.  It doesn't matter.  The gangland supremo Boaby 'Shaky' Stevens is involved, as is DI Fitz Fitzsimmons, sworn enemy of Freemasons.  The action rattles along and Black pushes the personal jeopardy for his hero just about as far as it is possible to go.  Highly enjoyable.

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. 

Loss - Tony Black

This is more like it!  Proper Tartan Noir and the best Tony Black I have read so far.  Loss is the third in the Gus Drury series, and noir is much easier with a non-cop as protagonist.  Gus, an unemployed ex-reporter with far too many dodgy mates is bound by no rules save personal honour.  He has friends, contacts, and even an ex-wife he's reunited with, but essentially he works alone.

It's coming up to Christmas - family time.  The snow is falling, Edinburgh is packed with Christmas shoppers - and Gus's respectable younger brother turns up with a bullet through his heart.  We have the perfect scenario for an amphetamine-fuelled quest for revenge.

Black's writing is pitch perfect.  The side-of-the-mouth wisecracks, my favourite concerning the Scottish Parliament building:  "It was our national shame; well, one of them.  The cost had been the cause of massive anger and political recriminations, but none of the main players had lost their hats.  I'd read in the paper recently that, at night, the forecourt of the place had been taken over by skateboarders.  I saw their tracks now: wheel marks, skids and doughnuts on the concrete.  A half-billion skatepark - money well spent.

"Out the back of the parliament a Marks and Spencer food van was being unloaded.  Christ, this got my goat - did those bastards deprive themselves of nothing?  Fucking Markies food deliveries whilst half the country is on bread rations.  It boiled my piss."

It's also much easier to do noir in the first person.

The chase at the end is masterful and Black avoids the mistake of continuing after the resolution.  Indeed, the laconic pay-off that ends the book is as good as I've ever seen.  Top recommendation.

Murder Mile - Tony Black

The second in the DI Rob Brennan series came as something as a disappointment.  Not that it's intrinsically less good than Truth Lies Bleeding, but that it's exactly the same.  And I mean exactly, almost a replica.  It reads well, it moves along, but every step is an echo of what we read before.  And the deep background of the characters which is so admired in the earlier book is missing here.  As for the plotting, we know who did it far too early on and can guess how the denouement is shaping up by about two thirds of the way in.  The denouement is extremely well written though, building the tension beautifully.

Not so much an advance, then, more a holding statement.  Hopefully the third Brennan moves things forward.  Black is definitely worth sticking with.

Truth Lies Bleeding - Tony Black

Black is the latest star of Tartan Noir, albeit he was born in Australia.  Truth Lies Bleeding is the first of his procedural strand featuring DI Rob Brennan.  You'd never guess it given the huge amount of backstory that is implied here.  I for one checked that the publisher hadn't somehow made a mistake but no, that story (which is solved here) was never written, and that is a mark of the quality of Black's writing.  He may knock them out at a rate of knots but this novel at least is a finely crafted work of art.

The procedural stuff is front and centre and eminently credible.  Black does not resort to the crude device of having his protagonist taken off the case a.s.a.p. so he can charge about like a private detective.  Brennan's battle is pretty much to stay on the case.  He has flaws but is not a drunk - again, Black inverts the stereotype and has Brennan declare that he never drinks more than one with the lads.

In fact, life at Edinburgh police HQ was so carefully evoked with murder squad members all behaving like proper, trained professionals, that I wondered if Truth Lies Bleeding was really noir at all.  The page one murder was bleak and gruesome but where does gritty become midnight black?  Answer: when Black unveils the twist that indicates the motive for the murder.  Oh yes, this is noir all right, better than most and as good as any I have read recently.

Black's first four novels featuring Gus Drury seem more traditionally noir.  It makes no odds to me.  I plan to read the lot.  Black has an excellent website and an interesting take on the use of ebooks to amplify the canon.  For that reason I am going to break with my own convention and add a second image.