Crime Beat

The streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh are getting meaner by the day if you take the word of Tony Black in Gutted ( Preface) and Craig Russell in Lennox( Quercus). William Saunderson-Meyer, writing in The Weekender, was impressed by both of these gritty thrillers and also by All the Colours of the Town( Faber&Faber), Liam McIlvanney’s assured political thriller debut. The damp squib in this week’s selection of fireworks is Glasgow Kiss (Sphere) by Alex Grey.

Edinburgh and Glasgow are fast becoming as familiar to thriller readers as Oxford once did in another era, through the Inspector Morse novels of Colin Dexter. Following on Ian Rankin, there is an array of tremendously exciting Scottish writers who have chosen these great cities as their backdrop.

It is however unlikely that the local tourist bodies will appreciate the often grim portrayals of cities that pretend to themselves that they have shrugged off the lean, mean days that predate their New Scotland reinvention of the past couple of decades. This is not the Scotland of skirling pipes and Braveheart.

Muses Gus Dury, the protagonist in Gutted, ‘More and more this city was revealing its true nature to me, in the most brutal ways imaginable. Try as they might to paint the place as a capital of culture, as “genteel” Edinburgh, I knew the real deal. The could stick their tartan troosers, their tea towels with the Castle on, and the Scott Monument shortbread tins. I knew what this joint was made of, and it was rotten through.’

Dury has a 60-a-day cigarette habit, an alcoholic, consuming Johnny Walker by the half-pint glass . Despite his self-loathing and destructive behaviour, behind the tough guy exterior lies a marshmallow heart, evidence of which is that he still loves his ex-wife, a childhood sweetheart, and the thankless work he undertakes on behalf of the Badger Protection Society, staking out the potential sites where badgers are ripped to shreds in baiting contests with pit bulls.

The former journalist now runs a failing pub in one of the seedier parts of Edinburgh, as he tries to keep his life afloat. An alky with his own bar? Not a good idea.

But Dury has other more pressing reasons to feel jaded. Courtesy of a corrupt investigating officer who is having it off with Dury’s ex-wife, Dury is in the frame for a murder he did not commit. To make matter worse, the £50,000 that the victim was carrying has disappeared and the local gang boss to whom it belonged wants the money back. From the hapless Dury.

In Craig Russell’s Lennox, the city is Glasgow, the year is 1953 and the criminal turf is shared between the so-called Three Kings. At the periphery, always jostling to grab some of the action, are assorted small-time but vicious gangsters.

Private investigator Lennox occupies a dangerously ambiguous position, sandwiched between the thugs and a police force that itself is brutal and corrupt. He regularly does investigative work for the Three Kings, juggling to survive their competing and vicious egos while trying to hoe to a more-or-less morally straight path.

Among the minor mobsters are the McGahern twins, hard on the make until Tam, the brains of the outfit, falls victim to a contract killing – a ‘Glasgow enema’, which entails a shot-gun blast up the rear. Tam’s brother, Frankie, turns to Lennox to solve the murder but mindful of the sensibilities of the Three Kings, Lennox refuses.

When Frankie is found dead, like Dury in Gutted, Lennox finds himself in the frame for the murder. And like Dury, the battle-scarred Lennox –- who settled in Glasgow after being demobbed from the Canadian forces and who throughout ironically refers to his innocent pre-war self as the Kennebecasis Kid – is as decent man as the times and the situation will allow.

Liam McIlvanney’s All the Colours of the Town, is set in the recent past, following the Good Friday peace accord that ended the Northern Ireland conflict that for decades had set Protestant and Catholic at each other’s throats in Northern Ireland. This assured debut political thriller ranges between Glasgow and Belfast and is written from the perspective of a reporter on the once great but now faltering Tribune on Sunday.

Gerry Conway, the political editor, is sent a photograph taken during the euphemistically termed Troubles, which puzzlingly shows Peter Lyons, the rising star of Scottish politics, posing with armed Protestant loyalists. The picture, if genuine, provides a tantalising glimpse of the unspoken of link between Protestant extremists in Belfast and their many secret supporters in Scotland.

Conway, hoping to rescue his dwindling fortunes as a journalist, starts to investigate. Unfortunately for his physical wellbeing there are powerful men who would much rather that the past remain unexamined and are willing to go to great lengths to ensure this.

Juxtaposed against this trio of mouthwatering Scottish excellence is poor old Alex Gray with her Glasgow Kiss, about as shallow and imitative a novel as one could find in a month of Sundays. The title is from the waggish Scots term for a head butt, but there is about as much crunching force in alleged thriller as being smacked in the kisser with a feather pillow. Give me the literary equivalent of the Glasgow enema any day.