The Dark Remains: William McIlvanney & Ian Rankin

Glasgow’s crime world of the 70s has three main crime boss figures: John Rhodes, Cam Colvin and the up-and-coming Matt Mason. When lawyer Bobby Carter, money man for Cam Colvin, is found stabbed to death behind a pub in Rhodes territory, naturally suspicion falls onto Rhodes and his men. Carter was a “career criminal. Or rather, a venally clever lawyer who didn’t so much rub shoulders with criminals as steep in the same polluted bathwater.” Carter’s death could be a message, a signal of war, yet to D.C Jack Laidlaw it’s just too obvious and he suspects that there’s more to the murder. Given the power-grab ramifications of the murder, it’s a sensitive case that must be handled carefully. Laidlaw already has a reputation for ‘rubbing people the wrong way,’ and he isn’t easy to work with. His skill as a detective though is respected and it’s acknowledged that he “seems to have a sixth sense for what’s happening on the streets.”

As Laidlaw investigates, he learns that Carter, with a gorgeous wife Cam Colvin is all-too happy to console, was a womaniser. And one name in the harem sticks out: Jennifer Love, a go-go dancer at Whiskies. The crime world is tightly-knit and it’s hard to penetrate when it comes to solving this murder, but Laidlaw, obsessive when it comes to his cases, keeps digging, and the same names keep floating up.

All cities are riddled with crime. It comes with the territory. Gather enough people together in one place and malignancy is guaranteed to manifest in some form or other. It’s the nature of the beast. In the awareness of the citizens the condition usually lies dormant. The preoccupations of our daily lives obscure any dramatic sense of threat.

The Dark Remains is a prequel to the other Laidlaw books. This was unfinished at the time of author William McIlvanney’s death and the book was subsequently finished by Ian Rankin. The gloomy world of 1972 Glasgow, divided into separate worlds by crime territory, is full of seedy pubs, low-rent hotels, lonely, neglected wives, and violent crims hoping to do their boss a favour before the boss even knows he wants one. Laidlaw is a troubled character who does everything possible to avoid his home life and family responsibilities. But the division of the two worlds, home and crime, are created in such a way that’s it’s understandable (but not forgivable) that Laidlaw finds it uncomfortable to straddle both worlds in one day. Going domestic takes the edge off of Laidlaw’s predatory drive plus it’s much easier to check out of his troubled domestic life, avoid those difficulties, and submerge himself into the dark side of Glasgow. I’m not a huge fan of police procedurals but the case kept my interest here. Laidlaw is a strange one–he likes to cowboy his cases solo, and then he tends to philosophize about human nature. This is tedious to Laidlaw’s workmates, but Laidlaw’s approach, when applied to human nature, works.

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The Less Dead: Denise Mina

In Denise Mina’s gritty crime novel, The Less Dead, single Glaswegian doctor Margo, following the death of her adoptive mother, seeks out her birth family, only to collide into a dark world of murder. Margo discovers a cache of letters from her birth mother’s sister but kept from her by her adoptive mother. Margo arranges a meeting with her long-lost relative, and after a few minutes spent in the company of her Aunt Nikki, it would seem that Margo was extremely lucky to have been adopted–even if that situation wasn’t perfect.

When people decide to go hunting for lost friends or relatives, there’s usually some impetus at work, and that is true in both Margo and Nikki’s case. Margo, who has just split for her long-term boyfriend (well, sort of) is pregnant, and with her personal life stagnating, she becomes curious about her past. In Nikki’s case, she wants to enlist Margo’s help in catching the man who murdered Margo’s mother decades earlier, a 19 -year-old sex worker named Susan.

While Margo wants to take the whole reunion thing slowly, and is interested in finding out about her birth mother, she is ill prepared to learn the ugly truth. It’s earth shattering to discover that she was the child of a heroin addict, and that her Aunt Nikki, who seems somewhat unbalanced, was also a heroin user.

Given the class divide, the meeting between Margo and Nikki does not go well. Nikki isn’t really interested in Margo as a person, she only wants to enlist her help in the hunt for Susan’s killer. Nikki insists that the murderer is a dirty cop. It’s just all too much for Margo, and she walks away. Naturally over the years, she’d imagined her birth family, but nothing she imagined prepared her for the truth.

Splintered. She imagined all of these alternative selves existed in parade worlds and these other lives have meant so much to her. They fostered possibilities and comforted her when things were miserable at home.

But once Margo is aware of her past, she can’t undo the knowledge, so it’s down the rabbit hole: soon she’s looking at news reports and even graphic crime scene photos. Margo’s interest in the case and her contact with Nikki stirs the slumbering past. Margo was unknowingly protected by class, education and in essence a new identity. All of those protections disappear once she steps into the nightmare of her mother’s murder.

The class divide between Margo and Nikki is well created, and since Margo is the spitting image of her mother, there’s a weird time warp effect as Nikki explains Glasgow’s terrible history of heroin use, and the murders of sex workers who were seen as easy targets by predators. There are parallel realities here: Nikki’s world in which women are slaughtered and no one cares, and Margo’s world where sex workers are far off in the hidden corners of society. There’s some great secondary characters here including author Jack Robertson, whose self-published book. Terror on the Streets argues that the murdered sex workers were victims of a serial killer which is contrary to the police claims. For crime fans, this is an entertaining read. Not gory, and the premise is off the beaten track.

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For Those Who Know the Ending: Malcolm Mackay

“He was a crook, yeah, but there was a limit to that. He took money, but he always left people breathing.”

With a title that has to be the best I’ve come across in years, Malcolm Mackay’s For Those Who Know the Ending opens with Czech transplant, gunman Martin ziptied to a chair in a Glasgow warehouse waiting for a grisly end. The book then takes us back in time to how the laconic Martin, desperate to find serious money in Glasgow, a town full of criminal gangs not interested in working with someone they don’t know, became involved with Usman Kassar. Usman usually works with his older dealer brother, but he also works jobs on the side, and that’s where Martin comes in.  Word is out on the street that Martin is looking for work. Martin doesn’t like the looks of Usman, doesn’t take him seriously and considers him too flashy with “oversized headphones,” and a gangster swagger. Usman is confident that Martin will be desperate enough to take a chance:

Always took men like him a while to realize that their celebrity only burned bright in their own neck of the woods, and now they had left their home city some younger spark would be filling that vacuum. 

Martin left Czechoslovakia under murky, desperate circumstances, and his savings are running out when he meets Joanne, and moves in with her. The pressure is on to start contributing, and so Martin, who’s lived this long because he doesn’t take chances, takes a chance on a job scoped out by Usman Kassar. According to Usman, it’ll be easy: it’s a two-man in-and-out job, hitting a bookie who is a front man for the Jamieson criminal organization. That’s the beauty of the job according to Usman–the fact that it’s dirty money means that the police won’t be involved….

The job doesn’t go quite as planned, but Martin is already in deep with Joanne and with bills rolling in, he takes a second job with Usman.

For Those Who Know the Ending reunites us with some of characters we’ve met before: most notably Jamieson ‘security consultant,” Nate Colgan. With Jamieson still in prison, and other criminal organisations always eager to grab Glasgow turf, this is a job that Nate can’t afford to screw up. And when Martin and Usman cross Nate, there will be hell to pay.

The book is written from the criminal view: so while the police are out there somewhere else in Glasgow, they have very little to do with the day-to-day concerns of organised crime. Instead we see the lonely lives of these career criminals (men and a few women) who’ve decided to pass on the complications and exposure of family life. But then there’s also Martin, who would like to be able to afford a family, and Gully, Nate’s ultra calm, aging sidekick whose sad, barren home life is carved by grief. The plot explores the dangers of ego, gangster swagger, and how being a legend in one’s own mind can sabotage clear thinking in an industry in which you survive by keeping quiet and being useful. These men aren’t romanticized; they have no conscience, and killing is just part of the job. Author Malcolm Mackay explores the abyss between robbery, GHB, and the ultimate crime: murder.

Gully knows that you don’t just kill a man and move on from it because you’re making money out of the deal. That isn’t how it works, not for normal people. He’s seen enough in his time, knows they’re not normal people. For men like him, like Nate, and like Usman, killing a man is a step out of the life you know, and there’s no turning back. 

Another marvellous gritty crime novel from Mackay–a writer who continues to dominate Scottish crime fiction.

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The Last Hack: Christopher Brookmyre

“Who I really am is the person that exists online.”

Last year I arrived late to the Jack Parlabane series from Christopher Brookmyre with Black Widow, the seventh in the series. The series has followed the trials and tribulations of investigative reporter Parlabane, and in Black Widow Parlabane’s career is in the toilet. In The Last Hack, Parlabane, whose personal life is non existent, is hoping to revive his career. This thriller/crime novel presciently tackles hacktivism and corporate malfeasance.

The Last Hack is partly the story of a young girl named Samantha Morpeth who, following the incarceration of her mother, is forced by circumstances to care for and support her sister, Lilly, who has Down’s Syndrome. Samantha is a powerless young girl whose life-path has been dictated by her drug addicted mother. Living in poverty,  bullied at school, rejected by the government agencies that are supposed to help her, Samantha is prey to her mother’s dealers who loot her home to make up for lost payment. It’s no wonder that Samantha, who is so powerless in life should turn to the internet to reverse her lowly position.

After Parlabane comes up with a story on hacktivism of a major bank, he is hired by Broadwave, “a burgeoning cross-media entity that has evolved from a completely new perspective upon news and technology.” Chances are he would have been passed over for the job were it not for his inside scoop from a hacktivist named Buzzkill. But when Buzzkill ends up in trouble, the hacker turns to Parlabane for help.  The job with Broadwave offers Parlabane a chance to get his career back on track but helping the hacker may jeopardize everything he stands to gain.

Unfortunately the plot of The Last Hack is quite convoluted. The book starts with a short prologue in which someone is “suffering the after-effects” of an electroshock device, and then the novel shifts to Samantha Morpeth who is sitting in a waiting room of a government agency. Then comes a section with someone calling around to a few different employees at the RSGN Bank. Then we switch back to Parlabane interviewing with Broadwave, and then it’s an internet chat between hackers. This is a group of hackvists known as Uninvited, and their next hack, against a major bank, is organised over chat. The chat is difficult to follow–not only the abbreviated computer-speak exchanges but again it’s a handful of characters who exist in cyberspace and have no other grounding. These strands connect, of course, but it takes an overly long time to connect the dots.

Free-floating prologues seem popular these days but when they’re followed by other seemingly unconnected strands, the book, instead of pulling the reader in, keeps the reader dancing on the periphery wondering what the hell is going on.  With the various strands packing the beginning of the book, it took me about 1/5 of the way through before I had a handle on what was happening. Once I got through the first 1/5, the plot took off. Of the two Parlabane novels I’ve read, I much preferred Black Widow.

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The Long Drop: Denise Mina

“He doesn’t say anything compassionate about Isabelle or Anne, two dead seventeen-year-old girls. To him they are no more than skin-covered stage flats in a play about him.”

I knew very little about the murders committed by Scottish serial killer, Peter Manuel, who was hanged for some of his crimes in 1958, and while I tend to avoid fiction written about real people, Denise Mina’s The Long Drop sounded intriguing.

The Long Drop is both a reconstruction and a re-imaging of the case. The book opens in December 1957 with a businessman named William Watt who attends a meeting with career criminal Peter Manuel. The meeting has been brokered by celebrity lawyer Laurence Dowdall who, on the way to the meeting, gives Watt, his client, various pieces of advice about how to handle Manuel. This advice is needed as Peter Manuel is a slippery customer, manipulative, cunning and extremely dangerous.

Dowdall, trying to hang onto professional integrity leaves Watt and Manuel alone. But why are Manuel and Watt meeting? For those (like me) who know very little about Manuel’s bloody, violent career, he was accused of, convicted and hanged for (as the book’s title suggests) murder. Watt’s wife, sister-in-law and daughter were three of the victims. They were shot in the Watt home, and initially Watt was the main suspect. The meeting between Manuel and Watt, brokered by Watt’s lawyer, is ostensibly for Watt to ascertain specific, secret information Manuel has regarding the murders.

The meeting morphs into a nightlong pub crawl with Manuel and Watt hitting many dingy, dank pubs of Glasgow. At this point, I put the book down. Could this have really happened? If you suspected that a man murdered your wife, daughter and sister-in-law, could you spend a whole night with him, buying him drinks? Truth is stranger than fiction. In the case of the Speed Freak Killers, for example, a large sum of money was promised to the killers in exchange of information about buried bodies. It’s possible that if you were desperate for information, you could put your personal feelings aside and make a pact with the devil. Possible if you had great personal restraint.

And William Watt was a desperate man. Although he was on holiday the night his family members were murdered, he’d taken the family’s dog, his wife’s dog with him–something he’d never done before, and eyewitnesses (who were later discredited) placed him on the road traveling back to Glasgow in the wee hours. Plus Watt had a mistress and his wife was an invalid. There was a lot at stake for Watt who was initially arrested but later released without charge.

Back to the book….

The Long Drop goes back and forth from the night (11 hours) in 1957 when Watt and Manuel went on an epic pub crawl to the trial of Peter Manuel in 1958. The night Watt and Manuel spend together reveals the dark side of a long vanished Glasgow. The smoke filled pubs habituated by the underworld in a city that will be renovated:

The coal smog is heavy and damp here, it swirls at ankle height. This dank world is peopled with tramps and whores from Glasgow Green and clapped out street fighters. A burning brazier lights men with fight-flattened noses slumped against a crumbling black wall.

Although this is a long dead case, with a terminal solution, Denise Mina brings the story to life while raising some intriguing questions both about the night Watt and Manuel spent together and about subjects raised during the trial. While Watt, who decides to “turn detective,” is seen as out-of-his-depth, a bit of a bumbler, Peter Manuel “is in a very different film. His would be European, black and white, directed by Clouzot or Melville, printed on poor stock and shown in art-house cinemas to an adults-only audience. There wouldn’t be violence or gore in the movie, this is not an era of squibs or guts-on-screen, but the implication of threat is always there.” 

Manuel is a sly, cunning psychopath and we see the various sides of the man. There’s the Manuel he’d like to be: a writer, a man about town, the man who’s courteous with women, but then there’s the sexually frustrated, violent son who intimidates his mother, and then there’s the charmer who tries to project his charisma and intelligence to the unbelieving jury. Manuel is a fantasist, a psychopath whose narcissism leads him to fire his defense counsel and conduct his own defense. We see Manuel’s staggering misreadings in the courtroom–evidence of his stunted emotional projection.

Peter Manuel does not know how other people feel. He has never known that. He can guess. He can read a face and see signs that tell him if someone is frightened or laughing. But there is no reciprocation. He feels no small echo of what his listener is feeling.

There’s a reimagining here–a fiction element of the novel which I cannot address fully without spoilers.  I understand why the author became so obsessed with this case, and why The Long Drop was created. For this reader, Denise Mina offered a possible explanation in a fill-in-the-blank way. As a work of fiction, it’s an excellent read, but while the author’s version is plausible, there’s an ethical position to this imagining. Those involved cannot challenge the book.

I follow the reviews written by fellow crime addict reader Cleo, and she also reviewed Denise Mina’s book, The Long Drop favourably.

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Every Night I Dream of Hell: Malcolm Mackay

Enforcer Nate Colgan first appeared in Malcolm Mackay’s The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, the explosive gateway to a series of novels focusing on a Glasgow organised crime network. Colgan didn’t have much of a role to play as the ex-boyfriend of Zara Cope who, in the Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, is shacked up with a minor drug dealer who trespasses on someone else’s turf and subsequently pays the price. Colgan was one of the most memorable characters in the novel, and somehow it just makes sense to find him spearheading Every Night I Dream of Hell.

Every Night I Dream of Hell is the fifth novel in the Glasgow crime series. The first three in the series (The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, The Sudden Arrival of Violence) explore the turf war between mid-level gang-lord Peter Jamieson and used car dealer with ambition, Shug Francis. In a grow or die scenario, one of the gangs will be destroyed and/or cannibalized by the other.

In Every Night I Dream of Hell the turf war is over and Jamieson and his right hand man, John Young are in prison, and that leaves the remains of the Jamieson gang ‘managing’ the turf, the deals, the money and the bent coppers. Nate Colgan is hired as a “security consultant,” and it’s a role he’s not particularly comfortable with. Colgan sees the writing on the wall thanks to the in-fighting and overall lack of confidence in leadership, but a new threat appears in the form of a British gang who, smelling blood, have moved north to invade Jamieson’s territory. Naturally with a very visible, violent threat knocking at the door, Colgan is involved, but his position is made tougher by the fact that Zara Cope is involved up to her neck with the British gang.

Both Zara and Colgan are great characters. Colgan is a killer but he seems to have a cool head on his shoulders. It must have been a temporary lapse in judgement that caused him to allow the sly, opportunistic Zara to creep under his covers. Or perhaps women are his Achilles’ Heel? Colgan knows better than to get involved with Zara again, and yet there’s something there he can’t resist.

There was something sweet and sticky in her words, a trap I didn’t like the sound of.

Zara may be a lowly figure in the crime world, but she’s in the sights of DI Fisher:

You can’t chase every rat; you will end up getting lost in the sewers. You catch the ones you can. You keep an eye out for the most rotten of them; you don’t get distracted from the bigger picture. But some, Jesus, some of them you can’t stop chasing. It’s not a professional thing to admit to, no cop should get sidetracked by a criminal of no importance, but it happens. Someone infests your mind. Might be a victim you just have to help. Might be a criminal you just have to catch. Everything else drops into the background.

There’s a lot of back story to the plot, and this is supposed to either jog our memories of the last four books or fill in the blanks (if we haven’t read the books), but the catch-up occasionally weighs down Mackay’s bleak, machine gun -style. Any reader should do themselves a favour and read at least the first three books first–otherwise you may be completely lost in the sea of names and past associations.  Those who’ve already read the earlier books won’t be able to resist this one.

For this reader, Every Night I Dream of Hell, although it involved the same turf, some of the same characters, and the network and hierarchy of a brutal criminal gang, wasn’t quite up to the standard of the previous four. This may be because Colgan is a lot like the gunman MacLean in many aspects–wanting a slice of normal life but understanding that it comes at too high a price.

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City of Strangers: Louise Millar

In Louise Millar’s thriller, City of Strangers, newlywed Grace Scott returns from a two week honeymoon in Thailand to her new flat in Edinburgh only to find a dead man in her kitchen. The man’s shoes are poorly fitting, he has no socks, and later, according to the autopsy, it’s revealed that the man, who had no ID was starving. The police chalk up the body to a burglar who died accidentally in the process of a break-in, but Grace has a vague dissatisfaction with the verdict which becomes amplified when she finds a scribbled note amongst her wedding presents.

With the signed note as a clue, and propelled by the uncomfortable knowledge that her own father died alone, Grace decides to pursue the man’s identity and find his family. What begins as a fairly simple connect-the-dots mission soon spirals out of control as Grace begins to learn two very different versions of the dead man’s life. She travels to London, Amsterdam and Paris with questions that lead her into the violent underbelly of the criminal world.

There’s a second story strand back in Edinburgh involving Ewan, Louise’s former journalism classmate and his boss, Sula, at Scots Today. Sula is chasing a story which concerns two bodies found in a pit cave: one man was an Australian hiker, and the other was a drug dealer, and Sula asks : “why would an Australian tourist be buried on top of one of Edinburgh’s finest drug dealers?” Of course these two story strands eventually connect.

Ewan and Sula are wonderful characters, and yet they are secondary figures in this tale. Their dynamic and dialogue sizzles and altogether seems much more real than that of Grace and Nicu the hunky prize-winning photographer she meets in Amsterdam. There’s one point when Sula pumps an unwitting PC  for information. He’s been guarding a crime scene in the cold, and she wanders up to him with a spare bacon roll. At another time, she borrows a greyhound as a prop to join other dogwalkers. The touches of humour which underscore how far some reporters will go to get a story help balance the darker, sadder aspects of this tale.

City of Strangers begins as a crime story but then morphs into a more complex, fleshy thriller. While I chewed up the story involving Ewan and Sula, my two favourite characters in the book, I had a much harder time with Grace, who dumps Mac, her newlywed husband without a word to pursue the photojournalist career she knows she wants. I found myself mulling over other plot scenarios: would it have been better if Grace’s husband Mac didn’t exist at all (but then he becomes integral to the plot later,) or what if Grace and Mac had already had longstanding marriage problems when the novel begins? I’ll land on the latter as Grace as a newlywed just didn’t work for this reader. She was too happy to sail off and ‘find herself’ which smacked much more of an unhappily woman than a newlywed–even one with a long-standing relationship such as Grace had with Mac. Grace is essentially drawn as a woman in the midst of a personal crisis having to choose career over domesticity, but the newlywed tag doesn’t mesh, and every time she ignores Mac’s texts or drops his calls, her actions push that post-honeymoon credibility.

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Black Widow: Christopher Brookmyre

“Just because you’re a psychopath doesn’t mean you can’t have emotional intelligence.”

Black Widow is the page-turning story of a talented, female surgeon who falls into disgrace through social media, only to recoup her life with a whirlwind romance with the seemingly perfect man. But six months later, he’s dead and she’s accused of his murder. …

Diane Jager once had a job as a surgeon in a prestigious hospital, but she led another life, online, as Scapelgirl, running a blog in which she revealed the sexism she endured as a female surgeon and the difficulty of balancing personal and work lives. The problem is, when anonymity is used to push a personal agenda, well sometimes people go overboard, and that is certainly the case with Diane. Her blog became a cause celebre amongst other female doctors, for Scalpelgirl as an anonymous agent tackled issues (and people) she would not have wrestled in person. The rage of the blog took over, and Scapelgirl becomes known as Bladebitch by her detractors, her identity was revealed (along with some of her sleazier moves) and she was forced to resign. She takes a job at Inverness, her “penitential northern gulag.”

Despite the baggage she brought, she was too valuable a prospect for them to pass up, like a provincial football team happy to take on a flawed talent who had fallen from grace at one of the major clubs.

At her new place of employment, Diane meets IT tech, Peter, and against all the odds, they hit it off, rapidly becoming absorbed in each other. With Diane’s biological clock ticking away,  there seems no need to slow down.

Six months later, Peter’s car is pulled out of a freezing river. Peter’s sister Lucy contacts investigate reporter, Jack Parlabane, and tells him that she thinks her brother may have been murdered.

Black Widow is a very cleverly structured tale which begins in a courtroom and then goes back over time through several points-of-view. We see events through the eyes of two constables: Ali Kazmi and Ruben Rodriguez who are the first on the scene of Peter’s accident–the ones who break the news to Peter’s not-so-grieving widow. Then there’s Parlabane’s view. He’s still bruised from his divorce and a catastrophic dip in his career, so the Bladebitch case offers not only distraction but also possible career redemption. The third viewpoint comes from Diane aka Bladebitch herself; there’s a lot to like there (she’s driven, talented, extremely intelligent) but there’s also a lot to dislike: she’s cold, unapproachable and prickly.

This is someone you do not want to fuck with. This is a woman who will make it her purpose in life to settle the score. They say payback’s a bitch? Then believe me: you don’t want payback from the Bladebitch.

The novel’s clever structure (which is just a teensy bit manipulative but forgivable and within the realms of acceptability–unlike Gone Girl which crossed the line IMO) is bolstered by a certain synchronicity, so we see PC Ali Kazam concerned about a possible pregnancy while Diane longs for a child. We see PC Rodriguez leaving London for exile in Inverness (echoing Diane’s trajectory), and one chapter in which Diane comes to an important revelation is immediately followed by Parlabane experiencing a realization of sorts. The portions narrated by Diane are the strongest and the most compelling in the book; she’s a terrific character, and over the course of her narration, we begin to see exactly how her character became crafted by experience.

I guessed the book’s solution and that’s probably due to all my crime reading, but I still enjoyed the book very much indeed. Work-life balance, sexism in medicine, the mirages often encountered in relationships, all these issues are tackled rather well here, so combine that with a page-turning crime novel, and you have an excellent read.

Black Widow is the seventh in the Jack Parlabane series, and in spite of the fact that this is the first one (so far) that I’ve read, I had no problem reading this as a stand-alone.

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Open Wounds: Douglas Skelton

“Maybe he’s reached the end of his shelf life.”

Open Wounds, the fourth and final book in the Davie McCall Scottish crime series, finds the series protagonist, now 38 years old, still leading  ‘The Life,’ ten years since a prison sentence. McCall works for “Glasgow Godfather” Big Rab McClymont but wants out of the violence, something he confides to childhood friend, Bobby, a former crim who now owns a decorating store and leads a quiet family life. McCall, who was brought up in an incredibly violent home, stepped into The Life seamlessly, but now some of his past actions chew away at the dark reaches of his consciousness; he’s beginning to question his actions, and in the type of work he’s in, where loyalty is premium, conscience and questioning orders are both luxuries he can’t afford.

A violent job with explosive sidekick, Jimsie, a man who enjoys inflicting physical punishment and has a “tendency to go over the top,” leaves McCall with the definite feeling that he no longer has the stomach for the work.

When McCall’s boss tells McCall to ‘fix’ freshly released Jerry O’Neill who’s talking to The Criminal Case Review Commission, the object is to shut the man up, but O’Neill claims he was framed by McClymont, and with McClymont seizing O’Neill’s former business concerns, there’s something about O’Neill’s story that rings true. McCall starts digging into the case on his own assisted by former cop, Donovan, now private detective. On the other end of the spectrum, McClymont leans on bent cop, Jimmy Knight, aka The Black Night for help.

“It happens,” Knight went on. “Guy gets older, slows down, doesn’t have the heart for things he used to. Man like McCall, without the ambition or the brain to be anything other than what he is, well, he can outlive his usefulness. Time to be put out to pasture, maybe.”

A complication in McCall’s life occurs when he becomes involved with a woman who lives in the same apartment complex. In his line of work, McCall can’t afford personal relationships, but the desire for a normal life proves to be a testing point.

The author presents an interesting portrait of a much-feared enforcer whose reputation causes those he visits to quiver at the knees, and yet, through the narrative, we see a man, in early middle age, developing doubts about the world he embraced, unquestioningly, decades earlier. There’s an edge of humour in the novel that lightens this dark, violent tale, and McCall’s deep attachment to his dog wins this character a lot of points.

Blood City, Crow Bait, and Devil’s Knock are the first three books in the series, and although it was no problem to read and enjoy Open Wounds as a standalone (the backstory and past events are woven in well), I feel as though I’ve missed some excellent books and that I should have read the series from the beginning for maximum enjoyment. Other reviews across the internet express the same sentiment.

Special thanks to Crimeworm for pointing me to this book.

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The Night the Rich Men Burned:Malcolm Mackay

“It’s not about winning. It’s about winning with as few losses as possible.”

The Night the Rich Men Died from Scottish author Malcolm Mackay is a brutal look at the Glasgow criminal world through the lens of debt collection.  Alex Glass and Oliver Peterkinney left school, joined Glasgow’s unemployed and have no prospects whatsoever, so working odd jobs for flashy criminal Marty Jones sounds like a good idea. It’s Glass who eagerly pulls a disinterested Peterkinney into the game when Glass takes a muscle job beating up a man called Holmes who’s skimmed money from Marty.

The job goes well thanks to Peterkinney, but it could have so easily have gone badly due to a total lack of planning. This short, swift act of brutality is Peterkinney and Glass’s introduction into the criminal life. Glass is the one who glamorises the life, attending parties, snorting coke and playing house with a hooker, while Peterkinney, living in his grandfather’s depressing flat, initially just goes along with Glass’s plan, yet he turns out to be a natural.

Both young men begin their criminal life on the same rung of the ladder, but whereas Glass very quickly becomes a bottom feeder, Peterkinney, who “loves the feeling of power, of intimidation,” with cold unflappability and intelligence soon rises….

Mackay once again thrusts the reader firmly into the criminal world but this time it’s money lending and debt collection with tendrils out to all avenues of organization. Are there coppers out there somewhere? Yes, bent copper, the slippery Greig, makes another appearance here, once again lining his own pockets while creating his own paradoxical moral code. Mackay’s exploration of the vicious nuances of debt collection, “economy in the gutter,” explains each step of how this ugly world works. Obviously if people go to moneylenders and desperately sign up for 6,000% interest, then we are talking about punters who have no access to regular avenues of credit. This is a slice of the population who are already the underclass, and if they’re desperate enough to borrow, how will they repay sums of money that grow, exponentially, with interest daily? This is, of course, where debt collection comes into play. Unpaid debts with accumulated interest are sold for a percentage to debt buyers. Marty Jones, protected by the powerful Jamieson organization, runs clubs, women, drugs and has his fingers in all aspects of debt lending and collection, but there are also “dedicated” debt buyers. The morbidly obese Potty Cruikshank, who runs an old, well-established business inherited from his uncle used to own this world but now Billy Patterson,”clever and ruthless,” he’s “built a reputation as being relatively harmless. […] Nothing the big movers need to worry about.” Yet Patterson is moving up, is cutting into Potty’s business buying debts at a higher rate in order to elbow Potty aside.

That’s the business. They have to fall out so that they can try to take market share from each other. And they have to take market share from each other. Have to be seen to be growing, otherwise they stagnate. Stagnate, and you become a target. The industry turns on rivalry. Everyone knows this.

Debt buyers need debt collectors, and that’s how most of the trouble in this novel emerges. One debt collector skims off of a buyer, another debt collector ruffles the feathers of a rival organization, and yet another, in a drunken rage, goes far beyond his assignment. There’s a circular sense of fate to this novel that somehow lends a dark twisted morality to this tale of Peterkinney’s cold, calculating meteoric rise.

I read Malcolm Mackay’s: The Glasgow Trilogy (The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, and  The Sudden Arrival of Violence .) The trilogy focused on the power struggle between the well-established Jamieson organization and the up-and-coming ambitious Shug Francis. This turf war is seen mainly through the role of hitmen as independents and as integral to the criminal organization. While the focus on The Night the Rich Men Burned is on Glass and Peterkinney, other characters from the trilogy make appearances–usually as mere mentions. In this novel, Mackay, who has stormed his way into the world of crime fiction with four extraordinary books in the last year, applies his signature bleak staccato style to show the same brutal, cannabalistic world introduced in the trilogy, but we see it from a different angle, so while The Night the Rich Men Burned can be read as a standalone, you’re going to get a richer read if you read the trilogy first.

Patience is an uncommon virtue. Patience is often profitable. In this business, people like to rush things. They worry that if they play a long game someone else will blow the final whistle before their pay-off arrives.

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