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).

Blind Eye - Stuart MacBride

A Logan McRea story from 2009, this is MacBride on top of his form - dark, witty, and set in Aberdeen. Polish people are turning up with their eyes removed and the sockets burnt. Some of them survive. Inevitably, McRae, back from sick leave (having eaten human flesh in the previous novel) gets seconded to DCI Finnie's team. Meanwhile his immediate boss, DCI Roberta Steel, is pressuring him for a donation to her wife Susan's dream of a baby. On the positive side, his luck is in with the tattooed girl from IB and he uncovers a lead which gets him a free trip to Poland.

In Poland he meets a hot Polish policeman and a blinded bomb maker. This leads to McRae and the girl getting blown up - and we're still only about two-thirds of the way through the book.

I have always enjoyed MacBride. For me, he has overtaken Ian Rankin at the top of the Scottish crime fiction tree. Rankin's problem is that his hero has become aged and inactive. That hasn't yet happened with McBride, but Blind Eye reminds me how great he was in his pomp and that things have faded slightly over more recent novels. Still, as with Rankin, I won't be able to resist new instalments.

In the Cold Dark Ground - Stuart MacBride

I think I must have missed a couple of instalments in the Logan McRae saga. I knew that Logan had given up the big city (Aberdeen) in favour of a rural posting (Banff) back in uniform. I knew he had taken up with the Goth beauty Samantha and that he had been the surrogate father for at least one of DCI Steel's children. But I didn't know that Samantha was in a vegetative coma following an attempt on Logan's life or that the urbane gangland fixer John Urquart had bought his old flat for a ridiculously overblown price - that is to say criminally, comproimisingly inflated.

In the Cold Dark Grave is Logan's tenth outing. His search for a missing person leads to a naked male body in the woods. His head is covered with plastic and his body has been bleached to remove any forensic traces.These are the signature stylings of Malcolm McLennan, "Malk the Knife", gangland supremo of Edinburgh. The dead man turns out to be a partner in a shipping business with apparent links to McLennan. The other partner is missing - but turns up safe and sound back home. Meanwhile the police inquiry, now headed up by Steel's MIT unit, discover the dead man's collection of graphic homemade porn. Turns out his partner was a partner in every sense...

Logan has to cram in a lot of funerals over the coming weekend. First he has to pull the plug on Samantha as the palliative care team at her nursing home have given up hope. At the same time he is called to the deathbed of the Aberdeen kingpin Wee Hamish Mowatt, who has always been oddly fond of Logan and who now wants him to take over his empire. The other contender, the ultra-thug Reuben Kennedy, begs to differ. To top it all off another angry female officer, Superintendent Niamh Harper, takes charge. She seems to have taken against Logan for no reason. But there is a reason - and it's a good one.

MacBride is on top form. Some of the wisecracks are laugh out loud funny, the action dark and bloody, and the plot, despite its complexity, remains somehow credible throughout. The crime is always just an inciting incident in the McRae novels, but here it remains logical and brilliantly deployed. I didn't guess who did it or who the mole on the police team was, but the clues were all there. I say it again, Brilliant.

The Missing and the Dead - Stuart MacBride

Yes, it's a long overdue return to Tartan Noir with the ninth in the Logan McRae novel.

Wisely choosing to vary his established formula, MacBride has given Logan a career-development 'promotion' to the backwoods of Banff, where he is the uniform sergeant in charge of a shift of 'bunnets'.  Logan is trying to make a clean start but events, inevitably, conspire against him.  The discovery of a murdered child brings the MIT to Banff - under DCI Roberta Steel, it goes without saying.  Meanwhile the rubber heelers are after our hero following the collapse of a major attempted murder trial, and a bunch of the local paedos have gone missing.

MacBride's great strengths are plotting, character and prose style - just about the Holy Trinity for any successful crime writer.  He can put some horrendous comments into the mouths of his characters without ever losing humanity or compassion.  To me, he is the leader of the pack in Tartan Noir.  Number Nine is the series is every bit as good as any other, and always recommended.

The Hanging Shed - Gordon Ferris

I said I didn't need to read it because I'd read the follow-up which gives the plot away.  But I read it anyway and whilst I did already know some of the plot, there was enough extra storyline to reel me in.

It's 1946, Brodie has spent the months since being demobbed in London, doing a spot of casual freelance journalism.  But he's called to Glasgow by old school pal Hugh Donovan who has got a bit of a problem.  He's been found guilty of murdering a little boy and is due to hang in a couple of weeks.

Donovan used to be the best looking lad in his age group.  Not now - trapped in a burning cockpit, he's a monster now, hooked on painkillers.  Brodie hasn't seen him since they were in late teens.  They stopped being best pals when Donovan took Brodie's girlfriend.  It's her son Donovan is said to have killed.

It's more Richard Hannay than Inspector Rebus but it moves along and has moments of reflection.  On balance I think the key element of the storyline, the whys and wherefores of the boy's death which I obviously won't reveal here, is too easy.  It's in all the papers and it's the first idea every new crime writers reaches for.  Which means you kind of expect it from every new crime writer.

I liked Bitter Water better, and I'll certainly read the other two Brodie novels, Pilgrim Soul and Gallowglass.  What I really like the sound of though is Ferris's other series, about a private eye with amnesia.  Why the hell he chose to call him McRae is beyond me.  Stuart MacBride has that one covered.

Flesh House - Stuart MacBride

Flesh House, from 2008, is the fourth of the Logan McRae novels, perhaps the most compelling series in contemporary Tartan Noir.  It shares all the regular tropes - horrors from the past, injustice righted, revenge - and features all the regular favourite characters.  It's the novel where MacBride really gets into his stride but you also get the sense that he's developing habits and the occasional shorthand approach to characterisation.  The premise here is great - the serial killer known as the Flesher has returned to butchery after twenty years; so has the man found guilty of the earlier crimes, now freed on bail.  DCI Insch, his blood pressure always about to blow, was on the original investigation.  So was the easy-going Chief Constable of the West Midlands, who pops up to Aberdeen to lend a friendly hand.  Other officers on the case are being targeted.  Who by?  Why?

The weak point for me were the scenes inside the Flesher's holding cell.  MacBride is exploring Stockholm Syndrome here, and there is a key plot point involved, but there were too many visits to the scene and for me it just got tedious.  I started skipping them and it affected my understanding of the plot not at all. I didn't figure out whodunnit, but the twist was too convoluted for me to care too much.  I always feel you need to know your villain - to a much greater extent than we know this villain - in order to get the real visceral shock.  I mean, that's the point of noir, isn't it - the horror of which seemingly hyper-normal human beings are capable of?

 As ever, a good, fun read - but not the best of the series so far as I was concerned.

Sawbones - Stuart MacBride

A very short book which today would be an ebook but which back in 2008 was that rarest of publishing birds, the stand-alone novella.  Just 114 pages - and that only by virtue of many chapters and only 40 characters a line - Sawbones is off the beaten track for MacBride, a serial killer story set in Iowa with a couple of extra-violent hoodlums as our heroes.  It romps merrily along - MacBride can do pitch-black crime on either side of the Atlantic - and comes to a suitably grisly end.

Well done http://www.barringtonstoke.co.uk/ for publishing novellas in the first place.  Extra congratulations for being a publishing house dedicated to books designed for children and adults who have difficulty reading.

Blind Eye - Stuart MacBride

 

By my calculation the fifth in the Logan McRae series, Blind Eye is MacBride on top form.  There is always a temptation for writers of series to take their protagonist out of his usual setting, and MacBride gives into that temptation here, sending Logan to Poland to follow up leads.  More often that not, relocating our hero is unmitigated disaster.  Not so here: whilst the story could certainly survive without the excursion, it is probably the better for it.

 

Someone is going round gouging the eyes out of Polish migrants in Aberdeen.  Grampian Police find a stash of weaponry.  They find Simon McLeod, brother of Creepy and son of the appalling Ma McLeod, another victim of the Oedipus killer.  And DI Steel wants Logan to impregnate her wife.

 

MacBride is the darkest of Tartan Noir, saved from unremitting gloom by equally dark humour and an obvious love for the Granite City.  The very last line expresses it perfectly: "That's what happens when you fuck with Aberdeen."

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.

Broken Skin - Stuart MacBride

The third in the superb Logan McRae series, and to my mind the best I have so far read.  Broken Skin features multiple crimes (burglaries, rapes, a fisting-to-death on Aberdeen's BDSM scene, and the world's worst brat-from-Hell, porn and paedophilia) mixes in Logan's complicated love-life, DI Steel and her cigs, DI Insch, his sweeties and boiling blood pressure, The Mikado and the legendary Ma Stewart.  The best line, which in its way epitomises the tone, goes to DI Steel: "I'd rather you didn't wank off my constables with a bread knife."  Quite.

Violent, funny, serious on subjects which warrant seriousness, and effortlessly flowing - near as dammit 600 pages, which just fly by.  The pupil of Rankin and McDermid, MacBride is surely the best of his Tartan Noir generation.

Natural Causes - James Oswald

This is the first mainstream novel from Oswald, who has previously written fantasy.  The paperback has just come out and the second Inspector Tony McLean novel, The Book of Souls, comes out on July 4.  I read the ebook version.

You google Natural Causes and you get a lot of stuff about the opening chapter.  I don't know how it works in the paperback but in the ebook Oswald has deleted the controversial opening, which was actually a pitch for a competition, but includes it as an appendix with an explanation.  For me, a version of the shock-open or something else entirely should have been considered.  It took me ages to get hooked on the story.  Don't get me wrong, the writing is good, the characters interesting, but there are far too many of them and I kept forgetting who was who.  I was interested - I wasn't gripped.  Fortunately, perhaps, Natural Causes is 400+ pages and by about halfway (the hit-and-run) I was hooked.  Certainly, I will give Book of Souls a go.

Funnily enough, Oswald is co-judge of the Crime in the City short-story competition with Craig Robertson, another up-and-coming Tartan Noir exponent who promised much but didn't quite grab me as I would wish to be grabbed.  One thing very much in Oswald's favour, though, is his sense of irony.  His crime-writing mentor is manifested in Inspector McLean's 'apprentice', DC Stuart MacBride.

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. 

Dark Blood - Stuart MacBride

First review of the New Year is our auld acquaintance Stuart MacBride, whose Dark Blood is the sixth in the Logan MacRae series.  At its dark heart is sex predator Richard Knox, released on licence and dumped on the Grampian Police because he has inherited his grandmother's house in Aberdeen.  The Press, the victims' relatives, and organised criminals from Scotland and the North of England, they all want to lay violent hands on Knox.  But is he just a docile nonce who's found God, or is he the keeper of dark and lucrative secrets?  It takes Logan the thick end of five pages to discover the truth.

The usual series characters are all present and correct - Beardie Beattie, Biohazard Bob, DI Steele (doubly on the razor's edge because her wife is about to give birth to Logan's child and because they've put locks on the office windows to enforce the smoking ban) and Logan's gangland benefactor Wee Hamish.

The plot, however, has too many elements - not all can be satisfactorily resolved without recourse to the long arm of coincidence - and I early on took against

Birthdays for the Dead - Stuart MacBride

Strewth, Stuart MacBride writes the blackest of Tartan Noir.  This is his latest, a stand alone outside the Logan MacRae series.  Our protagonist is a cop, like Logan, but a very different kettle of fish.  Ash Henderson is violent, in debt to gangsters and addicted to serious painkiller medication.  But none of those are the secrets that matter - oh no, Ash is keeping something much more relevant hidden from his superiors in order to stay on the Birthday Boy case.

BB is a serial killer.  He snatches young girls coming up to 13, tortures them for a while, and then kills them on their birthday.  Every year thereafter he sends a birthday card to the family - homemade, with a photo of their daughter in progressive stages of dying.  But is his target the kid or her parents?  This is the question posed by Dr Alice Macdonald, the young OCD forensic psychologist brought in to refresh the investigation.

The reason the investigation needs refreshing is that the next victim will be BB's thirteenth thirteen year-old, which has to be significant, right?

To say more would be to risk giving the game away.  Suffice it to say, Ash finds himself on a mission, a race against time.  The pace is unrelenting, the characters richly drawn with deep back-stories, and the plot twists just keep on coming.  The final twist is simply stunning.

A superb example of the genre.  MacBride is surely the next big thing in British crime writing.

Halfhead - Stuart B MacBride

Stuart MacBride writes the Logan McRae 'Granite City' police procedurals.  Stuart B MacBride, which I guess is some sort of homage to Iain M Banks, wrote Halfhead, a near-future crime thriller set in Glasgow.  How near in the future?  Well, perhaps only one more Tory government away.  Violent criminals are half-headed and happily doing all the filthy jobs.  The poor are kept high on virtual reality and stuffed into enormous towerblock complexes like Monstrosity Square.  Order is maintained by Bluecoats, the agents de police, and the hi-tech gendarmerie-cum-CIA of the Network.

The halfheads are more or less lobotomised - all bar one, anyway.  She used to be Dr Fiona Westfield, esteemed clinician and serial killer.  She killed the wife of Assistant Network Director Will Hunter.  Hunter caught her and halfheading resulted.  But now she's remembering.  She's starting to wake up.  She wants the other half of her head back.  She wants to feel the glorious ecstasy of slaughter again.  And she wants to find out what became of her special project, her 'children'.

I'm no sci-fi buff but I'm so glad I picked this one up.  The level of sci-fictionality is just about right - sufficient to justify the technology required but in no sense fanciful.  Basically it's a fairly straightforward killer chase enlivened with three-dimensional characters with real emotions and, of course, the compulsive Dr Westfield.  Filmicly I thought Blade Runner.  Fictionally I was put in mind of Stephen King's Bachman books.

MacBride-without-the-B's latest book is out.  Birthdays for the Dead is another stand-alone novel, contemporary this time and set, at least partially, in Aberdeen, but without McRae and the other regulars.  It's a must-read for me.

Shatter the Bones - Stuart MacBride

 

I was inspired to seek out something by MacBride after I blogged about his nomination for the Crime Writers' Association Bestseller Dagger over on my Media and Culture blog.

This is the seventh in the Logan McRae series, featuring an Aberdonian detective sergeant.  Joining the series so late I find all the continuing characters fully rounded and full of interesting idiosyncracies - Logan's relationship to his DI's baby daughter, for instance.  At heart, though, it's a police procedural and as fine an example of Tartan Noir as you're ever likely to meet.

Reality show infant prodigy Jenny and her fame-seeking mother have been kidnapped.  The Grampian Police have no clues to go on and no suspects.  They have to do it the hard way.  Then there's drug-dealing Shuggie and his girlfriend, skanky Tanya.  Shuggie is being pursued by debt collectors with unusual enforcement techniques, and Tanya gets herself kidnapped but nobody cares.  The papers are all full of guff about pretty Jen and pretty Alison, except for one newshound who scents a stitch-up.

Great plot, very 2012 in its themes, with just enough Aberdonian wisecracks to flavour the prose.  A crime writer to follow.