Alan Parks (2023) To Die in June.

I’ve read a few Alan Park’s novels. Don’t ask me which ones. I thought To Die in June had won the McIlvanney Prize, but it was his last Detective Harry McCoy novel. I’m a book or two behind.  I continually use the same line when talking about McIlvanney’s Detective Laidlaw series; his aim wasn’t to solve the crime but to solve the world. Detective Harry McCoy is from the same mould.

‘Wisdom comes through suffering.’ Aeschylus.

I’m all for wisdom. Bring it on. A first-page preamble which becomes understandable by the end of the book but which I’d have cut.

Straight into the action. Wedneday 28^th May 1975. The final pages, a week after Saturday 28^th June 1975.

Detective Inspector Harry McCoy is being shipped across town to Possil Police station. The supposed reason is Glasgow is being merged into the larger Strathclyde Police (later merged into Police Scotland). The real reason is police corruption.  He’s been sent to have a nosey about by Hector the Chief Constable who also happened to have adopted McCoy as a kid. Not even McCoy’s sidekick Wattie, Detective Watson knows about that and they’re thick as thieves. McCoy’s thick with a lot of thieves. He was brought up in children’s home. Cooper, his best mate is gangster, and McCoy owes him (that was in the last book, seemingly). Quid pro quo. Cooper is not one for letting go or bygones be bygones.

The inciting incident (or what happens) is Govan Jamie, an alky, is found dead on waste ground near Buchanan Street Bus Station.  Nobody gives a fuck. Alkies die all the time.

But McCoy cares, because his da is an alky too. He’s out living on the streets. Because McCoy cares the reader cares too. If we don’t love our protagonist for his faults and failings there’s little point in turning the next page.

The leading storyline is the Govan Joe and then other alkies dying. Word from the street is their being poisoned. (I think this did happen in real life). McCoy’s on it. Because he’s on the case Phyllis in forensics (although it wasn’t called that then) has to look again at the sudden deaths of elderly male drinkers (men over fifty, that’s my age—that could be me and I want McCoy on the case).

A secondary storyline or plot is the disappearance of an eleven-year-old boy, Michael West. McCoy is quick to scramble all the cars and call in reinforcements from neighbouring cop shops. But his mum has what we now call mental-health issues. Reverend West of the local Church of Christ’s Suffering explains to McCoy he and his wife are childless. There’s something not right about her, but there’s also something not right about him and his cultish church.

I could tell you another couple of minor storylines that come together in a denouement that is emotionally satisfying as long as you don’t look too closely at the stitch in time. I’ll need to go backwards in time now and read The McIlvanney Prize Winner: May God Forgive. Read on.  

Ewan Gault (2021) The Sound of Sirens.

I took Ewan Gault’s novel with me to get my Covid booster and flu jab. An hour-and-half waiting. It’s a pocket-sized book with the print a bit too wee for my liking. But I got stuck in and read most of the short twenty-six chapters in one long wheeze. I kept a few of the pages back to enjoy the denouement when my mind was a little clearer.

Crime/Thriller category. Tartan Noir. Ian Rankin, who wrote William McIlvanney’s latest Laidlaw, knew better than most, the Glasgow detective didn’t solve crimes but solved the world. The setting, Port Cawdor, bypassed by an A-road. Train station closed by the Beeching cuts. The headland were everybody knows everybody else’s business, and it’s a crime to be young. Not that they need much help with the heroin problem in a wee fishing village making national headlines. We’re more in Alan Warner’s Morvern Caller and The Sopranos territory.

First lines. Any aspiring novelist or story writer is told it’s the first line that reels the reader in.  You need to feel it on your tongue that this is the story for you.

The morning I got out of my dead cousin’s bunk and went to the mirror. I still wasn’t used to being at sea and felt sick half the time.

Books ask questions of the reader. The obvious one here is how did his cousin die? Which has to do with plot.

The less obvious one is who is the narrator? Well, that’s simple and complicated, as it should be.

We’ve got both insider and outside accounts. By insider I mean first-person accounts, the story as told by ‘I’ seventeen-year-old Malky Campbell. Bildungsroman. When he gets off his uncle’s fishing boat he buys a bottle of vodka and Great Expectations. I could witter on about the symbolism between the child Pip and the convict Magwitch, but really, nobody gives a fuck.

Amid the Dickensian poverty of Port Cawdor is the dual income, Tory voting, affluence, of those that have had a leg up and made it. Characters such as Inspector Stark, his headmaster wife and Zoe, the head girl at the school. One of the ‘brainiacs’ destined for medical school and better things, which meant never having to return to Port Cawdor.

Inspector Stark as his name suggests, is not one of the chummy insiders at the local nick. He’s the outsider that knows he’s becoming a cliché, investigating the case of why and how Malky Campbell’s cousin, Joe, died on board his da’s fishing boat. We are no longer with the ‘I’ narrator, but third-person, distanced, but close enough to the action. His goal is clear, he’s not overly concerned with the local crime family, the Kerr’s, or the collateral damage they’ve caused, but wants to get Mr Big.   

Junkie Josh sums up the gap (lines so good it was used twice):

‘We are the unprofitable bycatch of humanity. They’d like to throw us in the sea’.  

Literary representation or merit. I’m often not sure what that means. But I’m jealous of how good some of the writing is.

…long days of summer break sweet as a drunk girl’s mouth. Honeysuckle.

I tried to catch the cleaning woman’s eye, she was standing sentry still…A shabby pigeon bobbled across her newly cleaned floor, drawing a wing over its face, like a person going to court trying to hide behind a blanket.

Weaknesses—not really—but things I’d have looked at.

Plot: Although Zoe mirrors Nicky as the good girl/bad girl Malky could hook up with. Nicky’s shambolic and heroin addicted lifestyle means that they meet when they meet. Seems to me naturalistic (whatever that means).

Zoe meeting Malky in a petrol station off the A9, seems forced and unnaturalistic.

Secondary Characters: You don’t want them to be like the identikit Highland towns with shortbread and tartan that Malky hammers through with Zoe in the car. I can’t remember the name of the entertainer who explained that when the curtain goes up, his character had to be dressed a certain way, with shiny black shoes, and sound a certain way. In the next act, his character could be wearing carpet slippers and the audience wouldn’t notice. But the Council workers—Gav, Iggy, Pete and Frank—whose jobs I’m sure Ewan Gault is familiar with (as I am) seem much of a muchness. I couldn’t pick them apart.  But perhaps that’s my failing and not the author’s.

Port Cawdor lives, dive in deep. Ewan Gault has much to be proud of. Read on.  

Craig Robertson (2010) Random

This book is a bit of set-up for a debut thriller writer. The tag on the front cover tells the would-be reader, ‘Six Victims, One Brutal Killer, No Rhyme, No Reason, No Mercy’. The hard-sell for crime fans.  And in smaller font it tells you this guy is like Mark Billingham and Val McDermid. Wow, I say, I’ll need to read this, it’s been lying on my shelf, getting dusty for two years and when I read the first chapter it might have been another ten, because I don’t know who Mark Billingham is and if he writes like this, I don’t care. But then I read the book in one go. It took a few hours.

The background noise inside the book is motive. Why is this guy killing random people? What made it attractive for me was the setting – Glasgow.

The cops are the good guys, trying to capture the bad guy. But there’s also bad guys, trying to capture the killer, because he killed one of their own, a drug dealer. A loss of face, for an Arthur Thompson like kingpin, means somebody else needs to pay and loss their face too. Then you have the fourth estate, mainly the Daily Record, reporting on the case.  (Craig Robertson was a former journalist, writing what he knows.)

I guess in all Tartan Noir there’s a bit of Laidlaw philosophising, about taking revenge and needing to dig two graves, one for the victim. Not having a pattern, is itself a pattern. Serial killers and the mistakes they’d made. The ones that got away, Bible John and Jack the Ripper. The narrator is called by the press, Jock the Ripper. One theory was the Ripper’s murder of prostitutes was a cover up, of his real motive, protecting someone higher up, perhaps a member of the Royal family. Nudge, nudge.

Family plays a big part in the narrator’s life, but we know he’s fucked up, but when he kills a lawyer, you get the feeling he kinda deserves it. But when he kills a newly married man, the narrator’s motive become blacker and twisted and when he sets out to stalk and kill a random teenage student in the pubs in Ashton Lane and ends up in the Twisted Thistle with a cop at his back, it seems justice has been served. That would have taken him too far into the dark side. He backs off.

The book gallops along at a fair pace. The narrator reading press reports, we the reader too can scan, word for word. He’s a pal on the inside of the gangster underworld that reports back to him the latest doings. We know the type. And as a taxi-driver he listens to what the people of Glasgow are saying about the killer they’re now calling The Cutter, because he takes a finger from each of his victims with a pair of secateurs and sends them to the press or to the police. He doesn’t take a finger from his last victim, but still manages to give the police and gangsters the finger.

Here’s where it goes a bit iffy. We know why he done it. We know how he done it, because he’s telling us his thoughts and feelings and we’re looking over his shoulder, seeing what he’s seeing, hearing what he’s hearing, smelling what he smells. You want me to paint a picture, pal? Unfortunately, that’s what Robertson does. The denouement is too protracted. Too many loose knots are tested and tied, even down the last, falling, prayer from the narrator’s lips. Less is more. Jesus wept. Read on.     

Doug Johnstone (2013) Gone Again.

I recently read Doug Johnstone’s The Jump. I enjoyed it, so had a look at his back catalogue. In many ways we all write the same story again and again. I liked the Godfather of Scottish noir, William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw series, more for the characters and the Glasgow landscape than his ramshackle plots in which Laidlaw didn’t so much solve the case but tilt the world off its axis, which made him slightly less miserable. That’s Glesgca fer you.

Doug Johnstone does Edinburgh (I write about Clydebank).  Johnstone keeps things simple. Man, woman and child. One of them is in jeopardy.  Two word—explanatory—title, in The Jump it was the man and woman, because the child had already jumped. It was a tale of redemption set around the waters of the Firth of Forth and Queensferry Bridge.

Here we have Mark, who is married to Lauren and they have a son, Nathan. Mark works as a photographer, freelance, gig-economy (that’s the new 1 in 10 of use working in shitty jobs) and he’s trying to get the money shot, a picture of pilot whales, ‘spyhopping’ in the waters of the Firth. That’s a technical term which means poking their noses into other folk’s business. Mark’s on the shoreline of Portobello beach and he’s out of luck, he doesn’t get the shot he wants. When one pilot whale beaches, the others do too. It’s a kind of mass suicide and a suitable backdrop, or second string to the main narrative, which is Lauren has went missing.

Gone Again, implies, none too subtly, it’s happened before. When Lauren had Nathan she disappeared for about ten weeks. Postnatal depression was the diagnosis, but like those pilot whales in shallow water and beaching themselves, it was a way of hanging together some descriptions and some current idea about behaviour we don’t understand.

Lauren in the character in jeopardy here, but her disappearance destroys any semblance of normality. Johnstone is saying it could happen to us. Fling in the usual mix of gangsters, property rackets, incest and cops that are a bit stupid and last to know and you’re talking about one of my books, but since this is Edinburgh it’s Doug Johnstone’s turf. I’ll bow to him. Keep it simple and keep it moving.

You need to love your characters. That’s the real strength of Johnstone’s writing. These are people we know. Mark and Lauren and Nathan.  These are people like us. Read on.

Robert Pirsig (1974) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Robert Pirsig’s  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was the zeitgeist book of the seventies. Like Harry Potter but for adults it came with its own mythology. The reader can study pre-production notes between James Landis who commissioned the book for the publishers William Morrow and Robert (Bob) Pirsig. In a note by Bob Pirsig dated June 15, 1973, the author admits to anxiety and moots changing the title of the proposed book from  Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to ‘The Bendable River’. Landis dissuades him. In earlier correspondence admits the book ‘is not a marketing man’s dream’.  Robert Pirsig’s book was rejected by 121 publishers and he didn’t write his novel but live it. It wasn’t considered ‘“commercial” in the way that term is understood by most people in publishing’, but prior to publication was judged a work on genius by among others book reviewers on the New York Times.  After publication Robert Redford bid for the rights to film the book, which was rejected. But what would a film of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance look like?

I can’t remember when I first read Pirsig’s book. I guess late teens, perhaps early twenties. I loved it. Pirsig’s IQ measured aged nine was 170, he was a child prodigy with, we later learn, ‘a near photographic memory’. I don’t know what the opposite of photographic memory is and if I did I’d probably forget it, but if anybody asked me what the book was about I’d say it was about this guy that takes his son Chris, who’s aged eleven, on a road trip across the backroads of America on his motorcycle and blabs to him, and the reader, for almost 400 pages and also tries to emotionally reconnect with his son and explain he’s not the man he was, which is quite difficult, because he’s  emotionally guarded and not in touch with his feelings.  Pirsig jokes that if he were writing a novel he’d have to give an extended backstory.

On a motorcycle, ‘You’re in the scene’.  There’s a comparison with cars and the way the world is experienced. ‘Through a car window…everything is just more TV. On a motorcycle you’re an active participant in life. In a car, a ‘passive observer’. This is a value judgement. In the theoretical, film of the book, a world-weary narrator played by someone like Harry Dean Stanton would explain how to fix a motorcycle isn’t just a question of mechanics, but a question of life and who you are and who you want to be at that moment and in the future. He’s nostalgic for a simpler life (that probably never existed) when ‘a sort of Chautauqua… a travelling tent show, moved across America, this America…giving popular talk shows to improve the mind.’ He compares this unfavourably with faster paced radio, movies and TV. This is another value judgement. And now the narrator tells the reader about his friends John and Sylvia.

Sylvia says of those in the cars, going the other way. ‘The first one looked so sad. And the next one looked exactly the same way, and the next one and the next, they were all the same way.’

In other words, there’s something about modern life that is alienating. She is in agreement with the narrator, but offers no solution. The narrator’s quest is to find out what it is and where it comes from and perhaps suggest a tentative solution to this ‘mass hypnosis’. It’s in the title of course. Zen.

But John and Sylvia differ from the narrator. They are romantics. John, for example, buys a BMW motorcycle and doesn’t want to know about mechanical problems. He just wants the bike to work and if it doesn’t work it has nothing to do with him. The narrator is more a classicist. His classical education allows him to suggest an extensive nomenclature of tolerances and intolerances of different parts. But he comes unstuck when an elderly welder fixes the bike guard in a manner closer to art for art’s sake than his understanding allowed for. Rationality is always bounded. In Phaderus’s face off with Chairman of the Committee of the University of Chicago he raises his hand to contradict the speaker and suggest the Socrates’ suggestions of duality between those riding the white horse of reason (classicists) and others the black horse of passion (romantics) was actually an analogy. In terms of drama, his photographic memory allows him to quote verbatim from the Chairman’s own writing, unseating him. Classicists had rather a romantic view of themselves as the bearers of light and truth. Evidence suggests it was based on common myth. Mass Aristotelian hypnosis which separates subject from object and bounded by rationality that is impermanent and not rational.

Quality is neither of the subject or the object, but  suggests no answer, but rather we ride both horses, simultaneously, as Pirsig did in his writing. ‘Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialisation. It implies contempt for efficiency, or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.’  Or as William McIlvanney’s great Glasgow detective Laidlaw said, ‘I don’t like questions. They invent the answers.’

koan

ˈkəʊɑːn,ˈkəʊan

noun

1. a paradoxical anecdote or riddle without a solution, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and provoke enlightenment.

The narrator can figure out how to fix almost anything mechanical, but he can’t fix himself. He works endlessly trying to pin down the idea of Quality. But ‘The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.’ Sleeping four hours. Sleeping two hours. The journey back to self begins with self. Thoreau’s maxim, ‘you never gain something, but lose something’.

‘I could not sleep and I could not stay awake,’ he recalls. ‘I just sat there cross-legged in the room for three days. All sorts of volitions started to go away. My wife started getting upset at me sitting there, got a little insulting. Pain disappeared, cigarettes burned down in my fingers …’

This is a different kind of hypnosis to the mass variety. This is Socrates listening to the voice of his demon. This is Jesus going into the desert for 40 days and 40 nights. This is the Mohammed listening to the voice of God in a cave. This is Buddha gaining enlightenment. Or this is madness. I’d go with the latter.

You cannot recant without believe. Phaedrus was institutionalized and his brain zapped by electro-shock therapy as his carers tried to press the default button and reset him on the straight and narrow path to normality. I guess the world has moved on and we no longer use electro-shock and call it therapy.

I guess if we were making a movie of the book the Hollywood-type denouement is a bit too tinsel, Phaderus is giving a different font, which stands out on the page, so that when the ancient Greek Sophist, and ghost, behind the glass door that stalks the narrator as his alter-ego speaks to Chris, it’s not Robert Pirsig, but the man he was, admitting, no he was not mad, bad or sad. Just your normal genius. Amen to that.

 

great Scottish writers – William McIlvanney

I was out watching the fitba yesterday, having a couple of pints and old Lawrie was trying to explain what pub he’d been in, years ago, not by telling us where it was, rather by telling us who’d once owned it and who’d given him the money to buy the pub, but he couldn’t remember that either. ‘It was a great Scottish author.’ That was the clue to unravelling the mystery.

‘William McIlvanney,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘A great Scottish author’.

Let me tell you a wee secret, William McIlvanney is a great Scottish author and like Spike Milligan with Hitler, I’ll explain my part in his downfall. I’m going to read Docherty again just to prove that point to myself again. If you’re Scottish and you’re of a certain age and generation you’ll remember Taggart.  You might even remember it if you’re not Scottish. And if you’re drunk and want to overdose in nostalgia Taggart is still part of STV broadcasts in the same way that Dad’s Army still pops up on BBC (too frequently). The classic line in Taggart, ‘There’s been a murder,’ was so recognisable that talk show hosts used to mouth it cast members and smile, inviting the audience to laugh at them. Taggart became a cliché, to be mocked and so Laidlaw and Scottish noir also became something to be looked down on.

You probably don’t remember me being in Taggart, but at one point in time everybody in Glasgow featured in Taggart. You may have saw me featured in a bar chatting to someone, or walking past Taggart (Mick McManus) and looking very much like me, with the wrong coat on. I did also feature in a tracking shot as the back of Dr Finley’s head. A J Cronin is another of Scotland’s writers greatly neglected.

William McIlvanney allegedly tried to sell a series to STV featuring a straight talking Glasgow detective. But they didn’t fancy the idea. The next thing Taggart appears. Ahem. Do the maths. One-word detectives, that human aphorism, with the answer to a question you don’t know, in the title. Taggart. Laidlaw. Taggart is an older dour detective inspective showing a fresh-faced new start behind the ears the ropes. There’s been a murder. No son, there’s been a theft, the stealing of a body of work from an author. Detective Inspector Laidlaw is an older, dour detective, much given to philosophising and doing what he’s got to do, even though it’s not in the handbook, but because it’s the right thing to do and there is no handbook. Just life.  His sidekick Detective Constable Harkness, a fresh-faced new start has been appointed the higher-up heid yins to keep an eye on Laidlaw, and also, incidentally to help him in the murder of Jennifer Lawson.  That line – there’s been a murder – appears in the first of McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy, Laidlaw, followed by The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties.  Laidlaw doesn’t attempt to solve murders, he attempts to understand them and does so by wrestling to the ground Glasgow punter’s prejudices and inhumanity to humanity. Murder comes in many forms, in hopes and dreams.

The reader already knows who the killer is in Laidlaw’s first case, when the reader meets the detective. It’s the guy running away from the scene and we know he’s a poof and we know somebody is protecting him and we know why, because they love each other, or once did. But Jennifer Lawrence is not just another wee lassie that was in the wrong place at the wrong time, her da is a Glasgow hardman that lives in Drumchapel. Laidlaw has a soft spot for hardmen, he speaks their language and knows how their arcane rules work, and he knows where to find them in their natural element, Glasgow’s pubs.

Poppies was in a court behind Buchanan Street, along with a couple of abstruse businesses and an anonymous second-hand bookshop. It was the most recent example in Glasgow of a pub with adjoining disco, recent enough for Harkness not to know it. He knew The Griffin and Joanna’s in Bath Street, Waves and Spankies at Custom House Quay. The pub here, the Mavrick, was closed just now but the door to Poppies was open.

An open door is always an invitation. Laidlaw and Harkness need to find the murderer of Jennifer Lawrence before his poofter pal helps him to escape, or the Glasgow underworld help Lawrence’s dad find him first and bring the Old Testament eye for an eye vision of justice into view. The smart money is always on Laidlaw, but if you think it’s about solving a murder you’re missing the point. It’s about the writing. It’s about Laidlaw’s epigrams for living and way of seeing the world.

The Papers of Tony Veitch is a case in point. Laidlaw gets a tip off from a reporter, who talked to a porter in The Victoria Infirmary. ‘Old bloke brought in. Chin like a Brillo-pad. Smelling like a grape harvest. Just about conscious. But he kept asking for Jack Laidlaw’.

A doctor explains their predicament to Laidlaw.  ‘Having trouble with his airwaves. They had him in E. God he was filthy. Didn’t know whether to dialyse or cauterise. A walking Bubonic.’

Laidlaw does know the old bloke, he appears in his first part of the trilogy, an alky and a tout who no longer had his finger on Glasgow’s underworld pulse, because he doesn’t have a pulse. But Eck Adamson leaves Laidlaw a cryptic message. ‘The wine wasnae really wine.’

For colleagues such as Laidlaw’s nemesis Milligan it’s an open and shut case. An alky dies the world applauds, one less problem to worry about. The same wipe-your-eye principles apply, another thug, Paddy Collins, who died of stab wounds in the Victoria Infirmary at around the same time. But Paddy Collins is connected, his wife’s brother is one of the dons of the Glasgow underworld and he insists on finding the killer, before the police. Characters from the first Laidlaw novel bleed into the second. And Laidlaw applies the same detective methods, he solves crimes by osmosis. One clue lies in the deranged idealism of a potential murderer, with connections of a different kind, into Scotland’s elite society. Tony Veitch like Laidlaw has dropped out of the University of Glasgow because he believes it cannot give him the education he requires. None of these things, in isolation matter, but for McIlvanney and Laidlaw nothing ever happens in isolation.

In Strange Loyalties Laidlaw’s brother Scott is killed in a car accident. Nothing is ever an accident in Laidlaw-land. McIlvanney and Laidlaw’s strength is in documenting the social nuances between people. Here, for example, he goes to meet Scott’s father-in-law and his mother-in-law, Martin and Alice.

Their togetherness looked as cosy as an advertisement for an endowment policy…Martin had been a building contractor and a friend of many local councillors. The word was that the two aspects of his life hadn’t been always kept effectively apart…Martin was one of the smiling ruthless. Self-interest and callousness had been so effectively subsumed in his nature that they emerged as a form of politeness. He never raised his voice because he hadn’t enough self-doubt to make it necessary. He could listen calmly to opinions violently opposed to his own because he never took them seriously. He offered the conventional forms of sympathy effortlessly because there was no personal content to mean they might not fit…How long does it take to analyse a vacuum?

Alice, Martin’s wife, is beautiful enough to think the world is beautiful too, but that allows her to be empathetic, in the way that Martin is pathetic.  In Laidlaw-land the perpetrators aren’t all locked safely behind bars. They are pillars of society. Everybody is in some ways culpable and knows something, even if they don’t understand what it means. Neither does Laidlaw, but by the end of his book the reader might. That’s why McIlvanney is a great writer.