After the Scots voted in sufficient numbers not to break away from the United Kingdom in 2014, one corollary was that IAN RANKIN remained the bestselling British – as opposed to Scottish – male crime writer. Until the next referendum, that is. But what would British crime fiction do without Rankin? Apart from anything else, it would be somewhat lopsided in terms of the sexes, as there are markedly more queens of crime than kings. And, of the latter, Rankin is undoubtedly the ruling monarch, as such books as The Naming of the Dead have proved. Rankin was bemused by a host of media scare stories about the G8 meeting of world leaders in Scotland in 2005, and perceived that this would make an apposite background for one of his books. But (as he wisely realised) it would make more sense to have his tough detective Rebus on the borders of all the frenzied security arrangements, lost in the shuffle as his bosses are keen to keep this awkward policeman out of the public eye. Rebus is firmly on the periphery when the death of an MP (apparently a suicide) seems to tie in with hints that a serial killer may be at his gruesome work. Of course, the authorities want both situations to be very much minimised so that attention remains on this crucial world conference. But, inevitably, John Rebus jumps in with both feet, and encounters much resistance as his uncompromising methods bring him closer to the truth. Simultaneously, his colleague Siobhan Clarke is attempting to find the riot cop who assaulted her mother. So both of them have plenty on their plates.
Rankin’s crime novels, initially inspired by the work of the late William McIlvanney, have been freighted with political issues, with their social commentary integrated into his forcefully entertaining narratives. After having created (in DI John Rebus) one of the most iconic of modern literary coppers, readers might have been tempted to wonder whether or not Rankin – despite his considerable success – has had a few anxious moments over a decision he made recently: he retired DI Rebus. Another remarkable Scottish crime writer – Arthur Conan Doyle – failed to slough off his famous detective and was obliged to bring him back from the dead. But Rankin wasn’t killing off Rebus, just retiring him (and – surprise – he came back!).
After Exit Music, Rankin admirers were in some suspense – was there life after Rebus? A standalone heist novel, Open Doors, provided a reassuring answer – lightweight, but a delight. However, a big hurdle was ahead for Rankin: a new series character. And we were given the policeman Malcolm Fox in The Complaints. Had lightning struck twice? Fox is a very different kettle of fish. He shares Rebus’s burliness and bolshiness (plus an old drink problem), but is more likely to prefer Sibelius to the Stones. He cares for a frail elderly father and has no female partner. But the main difference is his job: Fox works for Edinburgh’s unpopular Complaints and Conduct Unit, rooting out corruption in the force. Fox is after a copper called Jamie Breck – and there’s a personal element: Breck is involved in the inquiry into the death of the abusive partner of Fox’s alcoholic sister. The changing relationship between Fox and Breck becomes a crucial plot element.
Some might have regretted that Rankin did not take the opportunity with this change of direction to choose a city to chronicle other than Edinburgh. Few have his skill at evoking the ancient town, but there’s absolutely no doubt that Rankin could have matched other writers tackling something other than their own patch. But who cares? Let’s face it, most Rankin admirers would be happy for him to take us down the mean streets of Auld Reekie for the rest of his career. And on the evidence of The Complaints, it looked as if Malcolm Fox would be just as sure-footed a guide to the city as his grizzled predecessor. Now, inevitably, Rankin has had his Batman versus Superman moment – pitting Fox against Rebus in later novels.
Just what kind of a novelist do you think VAL McDERMID is? If you’re happy to regard her as the creator of the damaged criminal profiler Dr Tony Hill in a series of commanding and operatically violent thrillers – and you would be happy if she ploughed that particular furrow ad infinitum – then perhaps A Darker Domain is not for you. Yes, it’s a crime thriller– but it’s also a searing piece about society and wasted lives that crams more insight and anger into its 300-odd pages than many a non-crime novel. Actually, McDermid has been freighting in such things for years, but this is the book in which she (metaphorically) comes out of the closet as the serious novelist she’s always been.
It’s 1984. A crime involving an heiress and her son fills the Scottish newspapers; a kidnapping, a pay-off that goes wrong, leaving a woman dead and a child missing. The case is filed under ‘unsolved’ until ambitious newspaperwoman Bel Richmond, holidaying in Tuscany, investigates a crumbling old house. On the flagstones, she spots a rusty brown stain, and Bel realises she’s stumbled on a crime scene. But she also discovers something else – a revelation concerning the decades-old kidnapping. Soon cold case expert DI Karen Pirie is involved, but Karen is already investigating another case from 1984. During the Miners’ Strike, a miner from Fife, Mick Prentice, joined the so-called ‘scab’ strike breakers down south. But he has not been seen since. Mick’s daughter, Misha, decides (despite the passing of years) to track down her disgraced father. But what really happened to him? The double mystery is a standard device of the crime novel, and McDermid orchestrates the tension with authority. She is performing, however, a canny balancing act here: crime narrative, yes, but she also paints a picture of a Britain riven by social and class divisions. We are forced to take sides in a 1980s dispute that seems as topical as ever – and if you think that McDermid will slip into standard left-of-centre platitudes, think again. In A Darker Domain, we begin to see Scargill and Thatcher as the twin villains of the piece: figures made for each other who between them left us a legacy of the Britain we live in today. After reading McDermid’s novel, readers may wish that more crime fiction would have the guts to take on serious issues along with the puzzle solving.
The Scottish referendum mentioned above has engendered a discussion on the nature of Scottishness and nationalism. But how important are such things in the world of books? LOUISE WELSH’s The Bullet Trick may be published by the small Scottish publisher Canongate, but is the target market a Celtic one? Just a few paragraphs of the author’s assured and highly imaginative novel make it clear that she would not be happy with just a local constituency – like many Scottish scribes (from Conan Doyle to Muriel Spark), Welsh is simply a writer, interested in the whole range of human experience and less concerned with the petty parochialism that both the English and the Scots have been displaying of late. Welsh made a considerable impression with her first novel, The Cutting Room: while the book utilised the conventions of the crime thriller, Welsh was clearly a literary novelist, and that balancing act is maintained in her subsequent outings. However, everything is thrown into the baggy delight that is The Bullet Trick: from the down-at-heel, sensuous pleasures of the burlesque scene to sharply realised locales (Glasgow gin joints, seedy Soho nightclubs and Berlin alleys – the author said at the time of publication that she was learning German in painfully slow fashion, but her grasp of the German settings here is second to none). Her shabby protagonist is Glaswegian conjurer William Wilson. He has been glumly watching his life go into a downward spiral and is desperate for a change, but he begins to tentatively believe that his luck may be improving when he finds himself signed up for a series of cabaret jobs in Berlin. The move from Glasgow comes at a particularly opportune moment, as Wilson has several people he’d rather not see again. The decadent charms of underworld Berlin initially look like the answer to a prayer, as Wilson plunges into a heady world of sexually available showgirls and persuasive conmen. But as his past (inevitably) begins to catch up with him, he finds the dividing line between reality and a more threatening nightmare world growing blurred. And, before long, he finds himself knee deep in paranoia and fear.
Those who want their books overloaded with lowlife atmosphere will plunge gratefully into the delights on offer here – but if your taste is for carefully refined prose and delicate effects, Louise Welsh is not for you. The other group of readers who should steer clear are those who believe that sexuality should not be confronted head-on in a novel: Welsh takes no prisoners in the area of the erotic – but how could she do otherwise when Cabaret-style Weimar decadence is on the menu? However, she is never a writer who is out for the easy effect by shocking the reader: the use of sexual violence here is handled responsibly, avoiding exploitation while not being afraid to tackle the subject with eyes wide open.
On the Isle of Lewis, villagers are stocking up on winter fuel in the usual fashion – cutting up peat. But they make a macabre discovery – one that is frequently made across Europe. Peat has the property of keeping bodies in a remarkable state of preservation over the centuries, such as the body found here – the Lewis man. But the assumption that this body may be millennia old is dispelled when a tattoo is discovered – one referring to Elvis Presley. This wonderful touch is one of the many praiseworthy things about PETER MAY’s exceptional The Lewis Man, which shows that its equally accomplished predecessor, The Blackhouse, was no flash in the pan. May has a prodigal inventiveness, which springs off every page. Saturnine copper Fin Macleod has left the force and has made his way back to his ancestral home. As well as terminating his career, he has left his wife in Edinburgh and has doggedly set about the task of restoring his parents’ rural croft to a liveable state. Unsurprisingly, Fin is soon involved in what appears to be a murder case (crime readers will struggle to think of a single novel in which a retired copper is successfully able to leave his old career behind him). The peat-preserved body undergoes DNA tests, and is found (in an unlikely development) to share a family connection with the father of Fin’s girlfriend when the detective was a boy. The old man, Tormod, is suffering from progressive dementia – and has, in fact, claimed that he was an only child. But the body in the bog gives the lie to this statement, and Fin finds that the dark past has an awkward way of resurfacing – both for him and for the father of his ex-sweetheart.
This is terrific stuff, and a reminder that when a crime novelist of authority sets his sights high, the results can be as persuasive as the best writing in any genre. Particularly effective here is the parallel narrative of the old man Tormod’s own story, conveyed to us with all the confusion of a drifting mind, but still as utterly compelling as the main strand of the novel. Fin, as in the previous book (and, indeed, in the final entry in the trilogy), is something special in the field of fictional coppers, and The Lewis Man itself is a very distinctive novel.
Every new crime debut is inevitably trumpeted by its publisher, though many such books fall neglected by the wayside. But every so often, a book comes along which not only justifies the publisher’s hyperbole but has critics attempting to come up with new adjectives to praise it. Recent examples include Belinda Bauer’s Blacklands and Attica Locke’s Black Water Rising – along with MALCOLM MACKAY’s debut, The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter. This book burst upon the scene in 2013 with the impact of a hand grenade, uneasily placing the reader in the mind of a hitman. Using the familiar trappings of the crime novel, the book was still utterly original, and it was clear that a major new voice had appeared, virtually fully formed. What made that novel particularly impressive was its terrifyingly laidback, authentic toughness – surprising, coming from a quiet, unassuming 30-year-old author from Stornoway (where Mackay still lives). And as if to put paid to the notion that a second novel after a powerful debut invariably disappoints, How a Gunman Says Goodbye was, if anything, even better than its remarkable predecessor.
In the second book, we’re back in the Glasgow underworld, where life is cheap and criminal organisations are constantly engaged in ruthless face-offs with each other. Frank MacLeod, a man who has long practised his callous trade as a gunman, is perhaps no longer the best in the business. Something of a legend in his circle, he has been doing his bloody work for the Glasgow gangs for over 20 years, but now his skills are in decline. Frank is over 60 and is dealing with the inconvenience of a hip replacement. Is it time for his youthful protégé, Calum MacLean, to step into his shoes? The two men have been friends, but events are conspiring to put that friendship to the test – and the results will not be pretty. The real achievement here is how Mackay has built on the dark and vivid vision of the Scottish criminal world that made his first book so memorable. Crucially, he has not forgotten the importance of pithy characterisation, particularly where his relentless protagonists are concerned. Subsequent work has proved equally intriguing, and the author is being hailed as a new star of Tartan Noir – Stuart MacBride and co. may have to look to their laurels.
Slowly but surely, the capable Scottish writer ALEX GRAY has been building a reputation in the crime fiction arena, and Keep the Midnight Out is one of her very best books. The series featuring her protagonist Detective Superintendent William Lorimer has gone from strength to strength; here he finds himself confronted with something reminiscent of a 20-year-old case that he failed to solve as a fledgling detective constable. The body of a young redheaded man is washed up on the shore of the Isle of Mull, bound in a grotesquely unnatural position. While trying to avoid treading on the toes of the local police, Lorimer finds – as so often in crime fiction – past and present colliding with incendiary results. Lorimer, as before, is a sharply characterised figure.
For a time, his publishers bracketed the sardonic CHRISTOPHER BROOKMYRE under the generic heading of Tartan Noir, and certainly his books deliver the gritty diversions that such a label suggests. But Brookmyre was always keen to stretch the possibilities of the crime genre – and his Scottishness was a long way from that of his crime-writing confrère Ian Rankin. Brookmyre has always been more than ready to tread on the toes of the politically correct while outraging those of a conservative bent, but his ideas are never pushed in our faces at the expense of the narrative.
A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil has many of the familiar Brookmyre fingerprints – satirical wit and a murder investigation conveyed with uncompromising detail among others – but it is also an attempt to do something new. And for those not totally under the Brookmyre spell, this might be something of a problem. Detective Superintendent Karen Gillespie is investigating a botched attempt near Glasgow to burn a pair of corpses. The two suspects turn out to be fellow pupils of Karen in her schooldays, and the man representing them is also one of her contemporaries, now a successful lawyer who has worked on celebrity cases. Everybody involved has reason to regret taking part in this grisly spin on a Friends Reunited scenario, and Karen is forced to wonder: can criminal acts in adulthood be traced back to playground traumas? While all this is handled with cold-eyed assurance, it’s quickly clear that, for all the authenticity of the present-day murder investigation, Brookmyre is most interested in writing a novel about the cruelties and betrayals of childhood. The flashbacks to Karen at school clearly claimed much more of the author’s attention. These scenes are vigorously handled; Karen’s childhood humiliation at wetting herself is given as much force as any event in her police career. Perhaps the comic episode involving some spectacular farting is a tad adolescent, but characters such as a monstrous neo-Dickensian schoolmaster definitely represent Brookmyre on fine form. And the changes that time brings about in school friends is something we can all relate to.
Is DENISE MINA becoming blasé about the crime fiction awards that routinely come her way? And the concomitant praise? The process was accelerated by The Red Road – a novel that reminds us that she is not only one of the finest practitioners of the modern art of crime, she is also a social commentator of perception and humanity. The Red Road begins in 1997, with 14-year-old Rose Wilson being pimped by her ‘boyfriend’ (using the term loosely), when she compromises her already ignoble life by committing two desperate crimes. Rose is arrested, and defence lawyer Julius Macmillan decides to take her case. Although she ends up in prison, she is visited by her sympathetic counsel, accompanied by his son Robert. After her rehabilitation, she joins the Macmillan household and even acts as nanny to Robert’s children as well as becoming Macmillan’s assistant in his law practice when darker corners need to be probed.
Unsurprisingly, all of this is handled with the assurance we expect from Mina, who is second to none in the creation of damaged female protagonists – and Rose is one of her most fully rounded and convincing creations. But then the novel moves to the present, where a deeply unpleasant arms dealer, Michael Brown, is involved with a murder in the eponymous Red Road flats, and detective Alex Morrow is a witness in the case. At the same time, a well-heeled Scottish lawyer waits in a castle on Mull, knowing that an assassin is en route to kill him; he has sold out his own father, and his days are numbered. These disparate elements (and a host of others – Mina is always spendthrift in her plotting) are brought together with authority, intricately drawing us into a narrative that engages with a variety of issues, all equally provocative. Concealed beneath the surface is an agenda that has been a consistent element of Mina’s work over the years: a passionate concern for the vulnerable and damaged in society – and a rage at injustice. Our sympathy is both invited and tested in the most rigorous of fashions, and it is to Mina’s credit that she is never sentimental towards her victims. And if the unpleasant characters here are writ larger than we are accustomed to with this writer, their unspeakableness serves the function of galvanising our responses to a complex, crowded novel.
In a short space of time, JAMES OSWALD has demonstrated his mastery of the contemporary crime novel, with such books as Natural Causes (the first entry in his series featuring Inspector McLean) proving to be a debut of real authority. Some five books later in that sequence, Prayer for the Dead made it clear that Oswald still has command of the thriller genre. The body of a missing journalist is discovered in the sealed catacombs of Gilmerton Cove, the apparent victim of a grim Masonic ceremony. His throat has been cut, and the walls daubed with symbols written in his blood. With its macabre and occult overtones, this case is a natural for Inspector Tony McLean, but even before his investigation is fully underway, another corpse turns up – once again displaying no forensic clues. While McLean himself may be cut from a familiar cloth, this is terrific stuff with lashings of pace and atmosphere.
TF MUIR is an uncompromising and gritty novelist whose writing is both astringent and focused. In The Meating Room (the fifth DCI Gilchrist book), these characteristics are strongly in evidence. When Thomas Magner’s business partner is found dead in his car on the outskirts of St Andrews, the evidence points to suicide. But Magner, a wealthy property developer, is being investigated for a series of alleged rapes that took place almost 30 years earlier. In total, 11 women are prepared to go to court to testify against him, but one by one they withdraw their complaints until only five remain. With the Procurator Fiscal now reconsidering her case, one of Magner’s remaining accusers is found brutally murdered in her home. Even though Magner’s alibi is rock solid, DCI Andy Gilchrist is convinced he is somehow responsible. But as Gilchrist and his sidekick DS Jessie Janes dig deeper, they begin to expose Magner’s murky past, and uncover a horrifying secret that has lain dormant for decades.
In the space of four or five books, CRAIG ROBERTSON has established his place in the crime field, showing an unerring command of narrative. The encomiums he received for his earlier books were echoed for 2014’s The Last Refuge, which initially appears to be firmly located in the Scandicrime genre but is shot through with the author’s own highly individual personality. John Callum has moved to the hauntingly desolate Faroe Islands, keen to put his troubled past behind him. The community on the islands is close-knit, but Callum finds it relatively easy to integrate himself – his only problems involve the nightmarish dreams that disturb his sleep. But then the quotidian life of the islands is shattered by an unusual occurrence: a murder. Denmark sends a specialist team of detectives in order to help the out-of-their-depth local police, and Callum is to discover that the relationship he has built up with his fellow islanders is as insubstantial as gossamer. They begin to close ranks, and he finds himself on the outside. His real anxiety, however, is caused by the hint that is coming to him through his nightmares: he himself might possibly be the killer. Those who have read earlier books by Robertson will not be at all surprised by the authority with which he delivers his cool but involving tale. The accoutrements may appear to be those of Scandinavian crime fiction, but this is in fact something very individual – and readers will find that it is quite unlike most other crime novels they have encountered.
‘Now for a header into the cesspool,’ George Orwell once wrote of British crime writer James Hadley Chase, whose No Orchids for Miss Blandish Orwell saw as reprehensible compared with the lightweight charms of the Raffles books. The rigid class structures of the latter seemed not to worry him, but he was outraged by the ‘general brutality’ of the Chase novel, with its casual killings and woundings, an exhumation and the flogging of the heroine. Were he still alive to cast a cold eye over the crime fiction of the twenty-first century, what would Orwell make of the novels of STUART MacBRIDE, a writer who makes Chase look like Enid Blyton?
MacBride is one of the signature writers of the Tartan Noir school, with a string of abrasive bestsellers to his name. His protagonist, the tough DS Logan McRae, moves through an Aberdeen that sometimes seems like an anteroom to hell. The novels are written in a scabrous prose that traverses the darkest recesses of the human psyche, but does it with a sardonic black humour that renders everything strangely exhilarating (although it’s unlikely that Orwell would agree). A Song for the Dying, however, is the second appearance of a character who previously surfaced in Birthdays for the Dead, the disgraced copper Ash Henderson. And if you’ll forgive a second simile, Ash makes Logan McRae look like Jane Marple. While Logan is at least able to function within the rules of the police force, Ash is from another era, unsparing in his dealing with the lowlife scum who are his daily workload. Politically correct he ain’t.
Henderson has been serving time but is released to investigate a series of gruesome killings committed by a sadistic murderer who has been given the name ‘The Inside Man’. The killer’s speciality is to operate on his victims, inserting a cheap plastic doll into their stomachs before dumping their bodies; a vertiginous climax is in the offing. MacBride has made it clear that he is not interested in attracting readers with delicate sensibilities, but those who respond to the most visceral crime fiction (and those not alienated by its author’s truly stygian view of human nature) will find not only the requisite excitement but a lively cast of characters and a pungent sense of place – although the invented town here, Oldcastle, is not as successfully evoked as the real-world Aberdeen. And there’s Ash Henderson himself, mesmerisingly ruthless on the page – but perhaps someone to avoid if he actually walked the streets.
Bagging the much-desired Crime Writers’ Association Dagger for best crime novel with the remarkable Raven Black is only one of ANN CLEEVES’ achievements. Two TV series adapted from her books have gleaned keen followings: Vera with Brenda Blethyn and Shetland, with detective Jimmy Perez played by Douglas Henshall. Cleeves is a well-known aficionado of Scandinavian crime fiction, and she is able to transmit that Nordic feeling into her own exemplary work.
If you doubt this encomium to Cleeves’ writing skills, you should pick up Blue Lightning, a cogent demonstration of her considerable narrative grasp and (her ace in the hole) persuasive evocation of atmosphere. Her Shetland detective Jimmy Perez is not looking forward to his journey to Fair Isle. It is famous for being a very tight-knit community, which does not extend open arms to incomers. As Jimmy knows, the islanders are a hardy breed – and they need to be, as winter approaches with its inevitable storms, making an already insular community close in further upon itself. It is in this pressure cooker atmosphere that murder takes place (this is an Ann Cleeves novel, after all) and the body of a woman is found with her hair laced with feathers. With the locals in a furious and fractious mood, it’s up to Jimmy to investigate the killing as quickly and efficiently as he can; not an easy task, as he has no resources to call on except his own. And as the clock ticks, the inevitability of another murder looms ever larger.
As in Ann Cleeves’ earlier Shetland mysteries, the trick here is to utilise the apparatus of the Christie-style murder mystery (most notably the cloistered, cut-off setting) and reinvigorate it with a healthy dose of plausible contemporary psychology. This Cleeves does splendidly, and even though Jimmy Perez may be a familiar kind of figure to those who read a great deal of crime fiction, there are still some canny changes that the author is able to ring on the formula. Best of all, though, is the skill with which she evokes the experience of being on these dangerous islands, and readers will be delighted that this series is continuing in parallel with her books featuring the indomitable Vera Stanhope (of which The Moth Catcher was the most recent at the time of writing).
LIN ANDERSON’s second novel, Torch, was also the second to feature forensic scientist Rhona MacLeod (following the character’s first appearance in the highly impressive Driftnet). It’s another pared-down narrative that wastes not a word, but succeeds in being a thoroughly compulsive read. Edinburgh is being plagued by an arsonist, and MacLeod along with her distinctly non-PC partner Severino MacRae – a man not given to worrying about the tender sensibilities of those around him – need to work quickly before the firebug lays waste to the city’s Hogmanay festival. As with so many of Anderson’s books, this is crime fiction that delivers exactly what it says on the tin and its sheer momentum is matched by its ruthless stripping away of any fripperies.
ALLAN GUTHRIE has said that he is strongly influenced by American noir fiction – especially James M Cain and his mid-twentieth-century literary descendants such as David Goodis, Jim Thompson and Chester Himes – but his native Scottish influences are clear too. He is a writer of crime fiction as opposed to detective fiction, police investigations rarely having more than a peripheral role in any of his books. His vivid tales of Edinburgh’s underbelly are written from the viewpoints of criminals and victims, and told in prose that is spare, hard-hitting, and full of explicit violence, absurdity and black humour. His debut novel, Two-Way Split – which was the Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year in 2007 – tells the story of an ex-concert pianist turned armed robber with mental health problems who’s secretly off his medication. On the day of a robbery, he finds out that his wife and a fellow gang member have been sleeping together. This is modern Scottish Gothic, with more than a passing nod to Stevenson and Hogg. While personal identity crisis lies at the heart of Two-Way Split, Guthrie’s second novel, Kiss Her Goodbye, looks at the nature of fatherhood. The novel opens with Joe Hope, an enforcer for a loan shark, discovering that his teenage daughter has killed herself. The rest of the book focuses on Joe’s attempt to make sense of her death. Joe Hope is hardly a likeable character, but Guthrie stresses empathy over sympathy. Kiss Her Goodbye was nominated for the Edgar, Gumshoe and Anthony awards in the US. More recent work has forcefully maintained the early momentum.
MC BEATON was born in Glasgow and began her professional life as a bookseller, but subsequently became a journalist on the Scottish Daily Express, where she reported mostly on crime, and later moved to Fleet Street and the offices of the London Express, where she became their chief female reporter. Her fiction career began with Regency romances, writing over a hundred such titles under her maiden name of Marion Chesney. But she tired of setting every story within the years of 1811 to 1820, and began to write detective stories. On a holiday trip from the USA to Sutherland in Scotland, a course at a fishing school inspired the first Hamish Macbeth novel, the quirky series about a policeman in the Highlands that is a particular crime readers’ favourite. Moving to the Cotswolds, she later created the long-running Agatha Raisin series: notably ‘cosy’ but beguiling.
With seven crime novels published over ten years (2006 to 2015), DOUG JOHNSTONE has ploughed something of a lonely furrow in the Tartan Noir community. Not interested in police procedurals, spies or secret agents, Johnstone is one of the few British writers dealing solely in the noir of the domestic, looking at everyday men and women and the split-second wrong decisions they make that can lead their lives to unravel. His novel The Jump is typical. Ellie, a middle-aged woman still mourning the suicide of her teenage son, discovers another boy about to kill himself by jumping from the Forth Road Bridge. She talks him down, seeing a shot at redemption, but in reality that action leads her life down a terrible and bloody path. This penetrating examination of suicide and the grief of those left behind is tackled with a cogency worthy of any ‘literary ‘novel on the subject – but without short-changing crime fiction aficionados. Like many of Johnstone’s books, The Jump deals primarily with the people committing the crimes, and looks at how the ripples of their actions spread out to cause mayhem within the wider community. And in Gone Again, Johnstone’s most commercially successful book, a father has to deal with his young son while trying to find out what has happened to his missing wife. The success of Johnstone’s books lies in the deliberately narrow focus: he hones in on the brutal everyday details of having to cope with extreme situations, and the reader therefore can’t help but wonder what he or she would do in the central character’s situation. It’s not comfortable reading, but there is something compelling about it all the same, as if the reader is forced to follow the story through the slits of their fingers.
MARSALI TAYLOR’s books are set in Shetland – specifically, the west side of Mainland and the sailing area known as Swarbacks Minn. The first book in the Cass Lynch series is Death on a Longship, in which sailing enthusiast Lynch has landed her dream job, as the skipper of a replica Viking longship being used to shoot a Hollywood film on location in Shetland. Back in her home waters after 15 years, Cass finds herself drawn back into the community, where her father is involved in creating a huge windfarm, and her school friend Inga is part of the protest group. The filming seems to go well – until a rock rolled downhill narrowly misses the star. Then Cass finds a body on her deck… This series focuses on country life in Shetland, weaving in the places and habits that are a legacy of the Vikings who once ruled the isles, the beauty of the landscape, and the distinctive dialect and folklore heritage, but it also provides a glimpse into modern Shetland: the wealth brought by oil, the fight against centralisation, the tug between money and environment (the projected windfarm in the book is inspired by real life), and – remembering that Shetland is 22,000 people living 200 miles out in the North Sea – the difficulties brought about by the council’s austerity measures in an isolated community.
The Hanging Shed was a massive success even before its print incarnation hit the bookshops, proving that new technology cannot be ignored even in the largely technophobic world of books. Until a few years ago, GORDON FERRIS was completely unknown; the Kilmarnock-born Ferris didn’t inaugurate his writing career till the age of 50, but his fourth novel became one of the most downloaded Kindle books in Britain. However, The Hanging Shed, and the other books in the series featuring reporter and ex-policeman Douglas Brodie, are set in the 1940s, so don’t fulfil the remit of this survey. Money Tree is a departure for Ferris, a literary thriller set among the glittering canyons of New York and the seething alleyways of New Delhi. At its heart is the story of a destitute woman in a dying village in central India, and her struggle against the daily embrace of usury. Into her fraught existence blunder two Westerners: a world-weary American reporter living off the faded glory of a Pulitzer Prize, and a hard-bitten Scottish banker wrestling with her late-developing conscience. As the tension mounts, their three storylines interweave and fuse in a strong and moving climax. In pointing up the gulf between rich and poor, and the misguided efforts of Western institutions to meddle in developing countries, Ferris pays homage to Professor Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Peace and founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. The book is the first novel in his new Only Human series – novels tackling some of today’s global challenges.
GILLIAN GALBRAITH’s Dying of the Light starts arrestingly. On a cold night in Leith, a policewoman’s torch shines on the face of a body in a wintry cemetery. It is the corpse of a prostitute, the first victim of a serial murderer. As so often in such cases, the threat to the women plying this trade is not sufficient to keep them off the streets, and DS Alice Rice looks into their activities on the back streets. And she soon finds herself in considerable danger. Alice Rice may have joined a very crowded profession – that of the tough female copper – but the auguries were good for Rice and her creator, who earned the praise of Alexander McCall Smith for her debut novel Blood in the Water. In the later, and equally impressive, Troubled Waters, a young disabled girl finds herself distressed and lost one cold night in Leith, and cannot find her way home. Shortly after her disappearance, a body is washed up on Beamer Rock, a small island in the Forth which is being used as the foundation for a new bridge. Testing all her sorely overstretched skills, Rice (now an inspector) finds herself dealing with not one but two deaths when a second body is found at the edge of the estuary. Is there a connection between the victims? The answer to that may be easy (when has there not been a connection in all the annals of crime fiction?), but there are narrative surprises aplenty here, in a book in which the storytelling ethos is ironclad. This is Scottish crime writing of real accomplishment, at times matching the most acclaimed names in the Celtic genre.
The QUINTIN JARDINE novel sequence that features the tough copper DCC Bob Skinner has marked itself out from the competition by pithy, idiomatic writing and some razor-sharp characterisation. In such books as Murmuring the Judges and Skinner’s Ghosts, a growing league of Jardine readers grew to anticipate the challenges the author would put his protagonist through (as in Head Shot, where Jardine dropped Skinner into a very dangerous USA). In Stay of Execution, he was back on his home turf as a series of ruthless killings make Edinburgh a very fraught place – particularly as the Pope is scheduled to visit the city. As Skinner looks into the deaths (a small businessman, found hanged; a musician dying under the wheels of a car), he begins to realise that stopping a major killing may be more difficult than simply nailing some criminals – the ramifications of this case are dark and far-reaching. Jardine at his edgy best.
When Val McDermid grants an imprimatur to a writer, it’s sensible to listen. CARO RAMSAY’s Absolution was a recipient of the McDermid largesse, and this was an undeniably caustic debut novel. The Glasgow locale may have been well-trodden territory for aficionados of Tartan Noir (and hard-edged Scottish crime writing is a crowded field), but Ramsay shows that there are fresh excavations to be made. ‘The Crucifixion Killer’ is murdering luckless female victims, leaving them to bleed to death with their arms outstretched. The case is a tough one for DCI Alan McAlpine and his colleagues – and not just because of the necessity of quickly tracking down a brutal killer. In 1984, McAlpine was a copper on the beat, tasked with guarding a woman whose face had been disfigured by an acid attack. Disaster followed this assignment, and McAlpine has been living with the consequences ever since. But as he gets closer to the truth about this more modern monster, the past (unsurprisingly) makes a grim return.
The world was obviously ready for ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH. Although the crime genre had long been plunged into a welter of blood and violence by stylists as different as Thomas Harris and Mo Hayder, there were those who hankered for the more genteel mysteries of the Agatha Christie era, replete with quaint detectives, ingenious plots and a marked avoidance of eviscerated victims. The phenomenal success of McCall Smith’s novels has demonstrated that publishers underestimate the spending power of this market at their peril. The author is notably out of sympathy with the sex, violence and unblushing language of contemporary crime novels, and his No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series harks back to a more sedate age, with their amiable protagonist, the generously proportioned Precious Ramotswe, fulfilling Marple-like duties in a sultrily-rendered (if anodyne) Botswana setting. The author, however, lives in Edinburgh, home to Ian Rankin’s tough copper, Rebus, who represents – one might guess – everything in crime fiction that McCall Smith is reacting against. And to the surprise of his army of readers, McCall Smith inaugurated a series set in his home town with The Sunday Philosophy Club, featuring a new non-affiliated female detective, the philosopher Isabel Dalhousie. This was a pleasing novel, full of imaginative touches and pithy characterisation – notably of McCall Smith’s new heroine. In the second outing for Isabel, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, she once again called upon her philosophical skills to crack some complex mysteries. She has found herself having ambiguous feelings for a young man, Jamie, who was going to marry her niece Cat. Her attraction to the young man means trouble – Cat is holidaying in Italy, and Isabel has agreed to take over the running of the latter’s delicatessen. One of the customers, she discovers, has recently had a heart transplant and is experiencing phantom memories that he believes belong to someone else. As Isabel investigates, she once again finds that her gift for philosophical discourse – and extrapolating facts – puts her in the path of danger.
McCall Smith’s publishers must have wondered if his Dalhousie outings would seduce those impatient for him to get back to the plump Precious. The books’ appeal is more subtle than that of the earlier series: the pleasures come from the aperçus on a whole variety of issues – the eternal problems between men and women, the seductive appeal of the Wildean approach to temptation (in this case, whether or not to give in to good-looking Italians or high-calorie confection). Not a book for those seeking stronger meat, but beguiling enough for readers with a taste for literary chocolate.
In Who Robbed the Dead? by TANA COLLINS, DCI Jim Carruthers and DS Andrea Fletcher are conducting an investigation into the brutal death of a young man when the peace of Fife is shattered by an explosion. What connects the tattoo of a bluebird on the dead man, threatening letters to a controversial politics lecturer and the shooting of a young woman over 40 years before? The investigation takes an unwelcome turn for Carruthers when the former colleague he blames for his marriage break-up is sent to Scotland to help with the investigation. Meanwhile, Andrea Fletcher has received shocking personal news. Can Carruthers and Fletcher locate and save the life of a man who has spent 40 years living in fear? Or will this man be tracked down by a shadowy figure hell-bent on revenge for an event that changed the course of British political history? This is the first novel in the Jim Carruthers series by the talented Collins, set in and around the historic town of St Andrews, a part of Scotland close to the writer’s heart.
ALISON BAILLIE’s Sewing the Shadows Together, set in Edinburgh, the Outer Hebrides and South Africa, is about loss and the question of whether we ever really know the people closest to us. More than 30 years after the murder of 13-year-old Shona McIver in Portobello, the seaside suburb of Edinburgh, the tragedy still casts a shadow over the lives of her brother Tom and her best friend Sarah. Tom’s family emigrated to South Africa after the tragedy, where he drifted aimlessly, with short-term relationships and dead-end jobs. Sarah seems to lead a perfect family life, but is haunted by memories of her friend’s death. On Tom’s first visit back to Scotland to scatter his mother’s ashes, they meet again at a school reunion and feel an immediate connection, but when DNA evidence shows that the wrong man was convicted of the murder, their relationships and emotions are thrown into turmoil. Tom uncovers secrets from the past and Sarah’s golden life begins to crumble as suspicion falls on family and friends.
JAY STRINGER likes to find his stories in the voices of people who are usually left on the fringes of mainstream society. This was shown with his Eoin Miller trilogy, starting with Old Gold, which used a Romany protagonist to explore social issues, including immigration, human trafficking, police corruption and sexual assault. His writing clearly owes a debt to American crime writers such as George Pelecanos, and Stringer also cites the works of Sean O’Casey and George Orwell as major influences. After writing a series of hard-boiled novels set in his native West Midlands, Stringer moved in a more comedic direction with his later Ways to Die in Glasgow.
MATT BENDORIS, when not holding down the day job as a journalist, is proving himself to be a talented writer of crime fiction, with his debut novel Killing with Confidence instantly establishing him; subsequent books demonstrated that his first novel was no fluke. Strong narrative skills and an acute sense of place are notable characteristics. Bendoris has worked in newspapers since he started writing a pop column for the Glasgow Guardian in 1989. After a spell in London, he returned to Scotland in 1996, where he has been chief features writer for the Scottish Sun ever since. In 2007, when his office relocated to Glasgow city centre, Matt tentatively began writing a crime novel, tapping out the chapters on the tiny keyboard of his Blackberry on the train during the daily commute. The result was Killing with Confidence, which focuses on a serial killer who uses self-help, motivational material to become a better murderer. His follow-up, DM for Murder, was written in much the same fashion, although this time the bulk of it was done on an iPhone due to his employer upgrading their smartphones. It also features his two principal characters April Lavender – an ageing, overweight, technophobic journalist – and her younger colleague Connor ‘Elvis’ Presley. The third April and Elvis instalment is Wicked Leaks.
RUSSEL D McLEAN has created a memorable private eye protagonist in J McNee (first name unrevealed), whose stamping ground is a vividly drawn Dundee. The Good Son is a typically idiosyncratic entry, with McNee up against a ruthless criminal influence that stretches from London to Scotland, while the later Father Confessor has McNee defending the honour of a deceased policeman friend. McLean’s work bristles with inventiveness and imagination, with McNee a winningly sardonic antihero. McLean credits his major influences as being mainly American writers, moving the tropes of private eye fiction to a Scottish setting in several of his short stories and five novels. The five McNee books (beginning with The Good Son in 2008 and ending with Cry Uncle in 2014) are concerned with family, guilt and the almost paternal relationship between local crime lord David Burns and private investigator McNee. While each book stands alone, together they form a longer arc, detailing McNee’s journey from damaged antihero to conflicted pawn in a game played between the local police and Burns himself. There may be other work featuring McNee in the future, but for now McLean is looking to work on other projects in new locations.
Other writers and key books
TONY BLACK: Truth Lies Bleeding, Paying for It
KAREN CAMPBELL: Shadowplay, The Twilight Time
SJI HOLLIDAY: Black Wood
DOUGLAS LINDSAY: Murderers Anonymous, The Cutting Edge of Barney Thomson
SINCLAIR MACLEOD: The Reluctant Detective
MICHAEL J MALONE: A Taste for Malice, Blood Tears
KEN McCLURE: Deception, Hypocrites’ Isle
KEITH MILES: Bullet Hole, Double Eagle
LOUISE MILLAR: The Hidden Girl, City of Strangers
DOUGLAS SKELTON: Devil’s Knock
ANNA SMITH: Betrayed, Screams in the Dark
ALINE TEMPLETON: Evil for Evil, Cold in the Earth