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.

1979 - Val McDermid

 1979 is the first of the  semi-autobiographical Allie Burns series.   Like McDemid, Allie is a smalltown Scots girl who wins a place at a major English university and, after an apprenticeship on provincial English newspapers, lands a job on a major Scottish daily.

She's initially confined to 'miracle baby' stuff - so-called women's stories - in the sexisr world of Seventies journalism, but she has talent and literary style, and thus becomes involved in her colleague Danny Sullivan's breakthrough story about tax avoidance.   The problem is, the story came from Danny's adopted brother who is central to the scam.   Danny is praised by his colleagues, ostracized by his family.

When Allie happens upon a scoop of her own - the terrorist wing of Scots Nationalism, she naturally turns to Danny for support.  Only a man would be accepted undercover.   The story gets really big, verging on too big.   Allie and Danny get close, but not that close, because it turns out Danny is gay.   And Allie's friend and supporter from the Clarion's Women's Section is also not what she seems...

The background detaial - the Winter of Discontent - is brilliantly brought to life.   I remember it well.   The world of newspapers, pre-Murdoch, is very much another country.   The characters are compelling.   McDermind is, of course, at the pinnacle of her craft.   Only the best writers can get away with leaving the murder as long as she does.   I genuinely thought there wasn't going to be one - and it didn't bother me one jot.

An excellent book from one of the very best.   I'm looking forward to 1989.

Broken Ground - Val McDermid

It was my intention to read the Karen Pirie novels in order but Broken Ground is the fifth, published in 2018. Fortunately McDermid is so skilled that it makes no real difference - she updates the reader on what they need to know, which is that Pirie's partner has been killed and she is in a period of bereavement.

The business of the Historic Cases Unit goes on however. At first it seems the body found alongside two wartime Harley Davidson motorbikes is outside the unit's remit. They only deal with deaths less than seventy years old in which there is a realistic chance of relatives and witnesses who are still living. Closer examination reveals the dead man is wearing trainers from 1995. Pirie and her gormless assistant Jason 'The Mint' Murray enter the world of wartime double agents, contemporary professional strongmen and motorhome etiquette of the mid-nineties.

The plot rolls out over 500 pages which unfold like a dream. I didn't much like the flashbacks but they were effective enough as a device for delivering the back story. I thoroughly enjoyed the development of the main characters and I especially enjoyed McDermid's daring finale in which Karen arrests her suspect but all her problems are left hanging for the next installment. So what am I supposed to do now, Val, if I find myself looking at Volume 2 and Volume 6? I know, the answer is obvious (get both), but which do I read first?

The Distant Echo - Val McDernid

The Distant Echo has, with hindsight, become the first in the Karen Pirie 'cold case' series. I make what might seem an odd point because whilst it is a cold case and Karen Pirie is in charge of the file, she doesn't appear until about 360 pages in and contributes nothing to solving the case.

What in fact we have is a dense, two-part crime story. In 1978 a bunch of mates, studying together at St Andrews University, stumble upon a body in the snow. Rosie Duff was nineteen, a barmaid at one of the student pubs. She has been raped and stabbed and dumped in the old Pictish graveyard. The boys are initially treated as suspects. They were drunk, they had access to a suitable vehicle, all bar one are of the right blood group. But there is no real evidence. They are bailed, their names leaked to the Press. It is assumed by all they are guilty. They are so overwhelmed by the pressure that one tries to commit suicide. In trying to save him, the lead investigating officer, DI Maclennan, loses his life. In effect, whoever killed Rosie is now responsible for the deaths of two people.

That story makes up about half of a 560-page book. The detail is immense, the characterisation forensically detailed. Flash forward twenty-five years. It is now 2003 and forensic science has moved on considerably, albeit nowhere near so much as it has today. Police all over the world are re-opening old cases in light of the latest advances in DNA profiling. The Chief Constable of Fife has decided to get with the programme and has set up a small cold case unit. Karen Pirie has the Rosie Duff profile, which is very much a priority, given that the other cold case officer is the younger brother of the late Maclennan and James Lawson, the first police officer on the scene, is now ACC Crime with special responsibility for the unit.

The four original suspects are now spread across both sides of the Atlantic. Alex and Ziggy are still close, even though Ziggy is a paediatrician in Seattle while Alex is a Glasgow manufacturer of greeting cards. Tom aka Weird became an evangelical Christian under the pressure of the original investigation and now conducts a TV ministry in America. Davey is a lecturer in French and has no real contact with the others, despite living barely an hour's drive from Alex and despite the fact that has sister Lynn has long been married to Alex.

No sooner has the case been reopened than Ziggy dies in a fire. Then a second member of the quartet is murdered. Another is attacked in the street and left for dead. The list of suspects is long and the police have no new leads. The evidence from the original investigation into Rosie's murder has gone missing.

The Distant Echo (not a great title) is a fabulous, serious, psychological and procedural crime novel. It demonstrates why McDermid is the grande dame of Tartan Noir. It is essential reading for students of the genre. I got it because I had seen a review for the latest Karen Pirie. I'm now seeking out the rest of the series.

Bloodline - Mark Billingham

Hard to say where Bloodline fits into the Tom Thorne series. I suspect it is Number 8. Does it matter? Not really. Bloodlines is still the right side of the dividing line which threatens all series - it is a crime thriller with bits of character development thrown in, rather than a character novel with bits of crime bolted on. In fact Billingham handles the 'personal life' stuff very well here. There is a major domestic crisis which reflects the main crime theme but the character development is that both Thorne and his partner Lou bury their feelings in their police work and prioritise the crime.

It is a serial killer story because Billingham is essentially a writer of very dark noir. The question is, in an era where genetic research is everything, can serial killing be an inherited trait? Essentially, the supposed son of a famous serial killing is going round killing the children of his father's victims in order to 'prove' that his father was obeying genetic code rather than personal inclination. It's a great idea, handled well on the whole, though I would have preferred some deeper development. Billingham rather handicaps himself in that respect by sending super-pathologist Hendricks, the fount of all theoretical argument in Thorne's world, to a conference in Sweden.

My only other reservations are these: I didn't care for the tricksy prologue and quickly fathomed out its relevance; and I really didn't like the killer's journal. These are very minor quibbles. I'm sure other people thought they were great. Yes I guessed who dunnit as soon as we were introduced but that to me is no problem at all. The plotting was as ever fiendish and Billingham writes like a well-modulated dream. The dialogue crackles, especially the banter between Thorne and Hendricks.

Has Billingham succeeded Rankin as the premier UK crime writer of today or is that Val McDermid? It's a close one and I fancy it boils down to how quickly Rankin dumps the increasingly tedious Malcolm Fox and fully revivifies Rebus.

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.