Scottish Noir, THE DIARY OF LIES by Philip Miller (3rd Shona Sandison Book)

Beach reading is wrapping up -- it's time for substantial and satisfying crime fiction to go with the hints of autumn rolling in. And the newest investigative reporter novel from Edinburgh's Philip Miller is perfect for the task.

THE DIARY OF LIES picks up with Shona Sandison, whose necessary walking cane (an injury sustained in The Golden Acre; more about it in The Hollow Tree) disguises her determination to get the scoop for her newspaper, no matter the risks. The promotional material for the book calls it a "paranoid political thriller." That would almost qualify it for nonfiction at this point, wouldn't it? Shona takes the situation seriously and angrily (a good definition of Shona herself), making it frustrating when her investigation takes her into what feels briefly like some adult-level fairy-tale crossover between Britain's "Green Man" and the mythic Robin Hood. Yet violence keeps erupting around her, and her narrow escapes are far from amusing. 

When a sketchy woman armed with a shotgun opts to let Shona past the gateway to a hidden Internet guru, she's still stunned from her sudden morning tumble into blood and threat. "Her path had been disarranged. Now, she barely knew her way forward." Plus, she's a city worker — how can she handle a situation that's taking her away from paved roads and GPS and all? Her abrupt passage comes with instructions from a rough woman leading her further off road:

"Over the stile and through the trees," the woman said. "Keep going straight ahead ... you'll come to a large house. The manor. The curtains will be drawn. You'll find Robin in there."

"Robin?"

"Loxley.  You'll be entering the back of the house. Wait at the curtained window — you'll hear the radio. Don't go in, love—he's armed. Wait to be let in."

Shona looked at the woman, calmly exhaling smoke. She was warning of deadly violence, yes she seemed serene.

"Okay. This way?" Shona pointed to the fence.

"I'm not repeating myself, sunshine."

What she discovers at the crumbling old mansion is a far cry from an upscale data farm, yet it offers access to the information she needs to make sense of the political corruption she's discovered. 

Shona looked at the data loading, the entwined wires, the blinking lights. This was not the journalism she'd grown up with, in which she had made her way. This was about systems, codes, data and access. Arcane technologies. ... She felt uneasy. Aware of how afraid she might be. 

It won't be easy to run, when the time comes. Not with her cane, and not without it. But bullets will soon fly.

One of the delights of this dark and well-twisted novel is the steady echo of Britain's older cultures beneath the action. There's no need to read the two preceding novels, but those who have will notice right away that the sense of ancient mythos and of a universe that's not automatically friendly is still throbbing in Miller's version of Edinburgh and its surroundings. 

Watch for the threads that tie Shona, however reluctantly, to her uncertain allies. If she's going to both survive the threats and provide a top-notch and substantiated journalistic exposé, she'll need every connection she can summon.

Soho Press describes this new release as a good fit for "for fans of Ian Rankin, John le Carré, and Denise Mina." I'd extend the list to work by Paul Doiron, Lee Child, Ruth Rendell, Jaqueline Winspear, and Charles Todd. If "political paranoia" is getting to you, racing against it with Shona Sandison may bring a sense of relief and capability, as well as the satisfaction of a soundly constructed and resonant crime novel.

Scottish Crime Fiction With Art/Heart, THE GOLDENACRE by Philip Miller

In a collaboration with Penguin, Soho Crime has now brought out an American printing of THE GOLDENACRE, a deeply mournful novel of art crime and greed, set in today's Edinburgh, Scotland. Denise Mina, the doyen of "tartan noir," calls the book a riveting, brutal journey into the high stakes world of inherited art and wealth, and it can certainly be read that way. But if your season allows time to enter Philip Miller's novel slowly, there is a wealth of literary depth to savor as well.

Two principal points of view dominate: that of sardonic reporter Shona Sandison, seeing her lifelong career at the Edinburgh Post melting away as digital platforms take over the news business, and that of the rather ineffective Thomas Tallis, designated to authenticate the provenance of a work of art called "The Goldenacre." The painting, fabulously valuable, is being donated to the Scottish government in lieu of back taxes owed by the mansion-rich, cash-poor family that owns it. Thomas needs to verify that it's really "the last precious work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the artist and architect" -- and sign off on the deal.

But Thomas is hesitant, uncertain, a weak reed in many ways. Which makes him almost the total opposite of his father, Sir Raymond T. Tallis, former deputy director of MI6. 

Thomas Tallis hasn't had much of his father's attention, and he's not getting family support right now, either. In fact, despite a small son in common, his wife seems to be divorcing him and taking the boy, and Thomas is doing nothing about it, despite enormous pain and grief. Slowly this comes into focus as a parallel to the wistfulness of the painting -- which portrays a pastoral area of Edinburgh still known as the Goldenacre. So when a hint of impropriety reaches him about the painting, this too is something he fails to take much action on.

Shona Sandison, though, is already linking the pieces, including the death (murder?) of a local artist, and the mysterious circumstances behind Thomas's recent change of jobs.

And then poor Thomas receives a very threatening message in the form of a human body part.

His collapse comes amid shimmering descriptions of Edinburgh, where he'd lived as a child. When he finds himself needing a drink, he knows to abandon the modern commercial part of the city:

There had been a place he had gone to as a boy. He would go there: the bend in the river. In the town where he had been sent to school, there were woods that followed the river up to its source A mile outside the town, the river—wide and slow—slowly turned. There was a beach on the slow side of the bend, and a broken viaduct. There, the shadows of the trees plunged into moving water and oaks grew. There was cool shade in the summer, and in winter the river ran swollen, and covered the shingle beach. He dreamt of it often.

Stepping back into his dreams, Thomas loses his grasp on the threats around him, and what to do about them. It's just as well, considering what takes place when the paired movements of this art investigator and the investigative journalist put pressure onto the major crime being organized around them.

There are several strands to the book's conclusion, and one might quibble with the forcing of some aspects. Yet it's undeniably a powerful and enjoyable read, and places Miller among the must-read authors who bind the tragedy of their crimes to Scotland's cities and feudal history.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

What Happens When You Add Ian Rankin to William McIlvanney and Get "Laidlaw 4"!

 

[originally published at New York Journal of Books]

“Reading The Dark Remains yields far more than the strangely amazing and touching answer to ‘what if you combined crime noir geniuses McIlvanney and Rankin?’”

The evolution of The Dark Remains is highly unusual for the crime fiction field, where an author’s death and incomplete manuscript often leads to completion of the writing by someone less well known, scrambling to climb the ladder.

In this case, the half-written book found after William McIlvanney’s death in 2015 landed in the hands of acknowledged master of Scottish noir, Ian Rankin. McIlvanney’s Laidlaw novels, set in Glasgow, provided fertile ground for Rankin’s own development of the Detective Inspector Rebus investigations, set in Edinburgh.

Now the master, in collecting and completing this work, provides an unusual act of generosity to the dead.

The Dark Remains is a prequel to McIlvanney’s Laidlaw books. Jack Laidlaw is the “new boy” in the Glasgow Crime Squad, taking his seat in a season when shady and money-grubbing criminal lawyer Bobby Carter lands in an alley, dead. As Bob Lilley admits on the side to the Crime Squad’s Commander, “Jack Laidlaw is not an unknown quantity, sir. His reputation has always preceded him, which I’m guessing is why we’ve been landed with him. Who has he rubbed up the wrong way this month?”

In short, Laidlaw is no team player. But as the Commander points out, “He’s good at the job, seems to have a sixth sense for what’s happening on the streets.”

Even-tempered Bob Lilley’s got a tough job in “babysitting” this new member of the squad. From the moment the Bobby Carter case goes active, Laidlaw rejects all routine assignments (like going house to house) and heads directly for Glasgow’s underworld, which he already understands. Like the two (or is it three?) criminal gangs wrestling for control of territory and resources, and those who may want to promote a crime war.

In this occasionally off-balance volume, commentary from Lilley fills gaps around the investigation’s action. That slows the pace. But it also allows a peek at how current master author Rankin views the original character, as Lilley analyzes Laidlaw: “Maybe he’s a streetsman, the way Davy Crockett was a woodsman. Davy could read all the signs in the wild, he’d lived there so long. Probably wasn’t so good on the domestic front. I think Jack’s like that with Glasgow: he brings the city home with him, and that’s too much for even a decent-sized living room to contain.”

As the strands of gang action are slowly sorted out (with more murder, of course), Laidlaw’s marriage circles the drain. Compared to his work, his family life is tame, mundane, boring—and Lilley takes warning from his colleague’s domestic peril.

Even McIlvanney probably didn’t write “from beginning to end” without changes—so a lot of what Rankin received was likely to be far from finished work. The shorter paragraphs, less deep descriptions, and uneven pace (compared to classic McIlvanney) all suggest exactly that. So reading The Dark Remains yields far more than the strangely amazing and touching answer to “what if you combined crime noir geniuses McIlvanney and Rankin?”

Instead, it presents an unusual sort of time travel: not to the start of McIlvanney’s astonishing career in writing the darkness, but rather to the basic bones of how he shaped a Laidlaw investigation, working from crime victim, to criminals, to the rough and imperiled moral universe in Jack Laidlaw’s mind and heart.

Near the end, Lilley again responds to the Commander about how Laidlaw’s working out in the squad, and what could lie ahead: “He’s the business. … He’s a one-off in a world of mass production. He’s not a copper who happens to be a man. He’s a man who happens to be a copper, and he carries that weight with him everywhere he goes. … Mind you,” he felt it necessary to quality, “he can be a pain in the bahookie too, but it’s a price worth paying.”

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

New Denise Mina Lifts Scottish (Glasgow) Noir to New Power: THE LESS DEAD

 [Originally published in New York Journal of Books]

“Mina’s touch with the dark, gritty, and disturbing is expert, and this book is a persuasive and frightening page-turner.”

Denise Mina has written two crime fiction series set in Glasgow, Scotland, establishing memorable investigators. The Less Dead is a stand-alone, also set in Glasgow, and circles around one bizarre situation: Dr. Margo Dunlop is pregnant, so she finally wants to know something about her own unknown mother. To her astonishment, as she tackles hoeing out the house where she’d grown up, raised by a loving adoptive mother, she finds a stash of letters addressed to her and never delivered. Letters from her birth mother’s sister, that is, Margo’s aunt, Nikki.

The first meeting with Nikki takes place at an agency that facilitates such reconnection. It’s an ordinary place, with an ordinary enough counselor, a bit over the top in her staged sympathy for Margo, but otherwise tame enough. Once Nikki walks in the door, though, all ordinary moments vanish from Margo’s life in a terrifying sweep of “the past isn’t even past.”

It turns out Margo’s mother was a murder victim, probably caught up in swapping sex for drugs at the time. And all these years, her aunt Nikki—sister of the murder victim, Susan—has been pleading (those undelivered letters, remember?) for Margo to help track down the murderer and avenge the murder at last.

Not so fast. An educated professional, Margo has no intention of being dragged into some crackpot scheme by the obviously eccentric and low-class Nikki. Still, now that she knows a little, she can’t resist looking up more, and even finds a crime photo online:

Margo has dissected corpses. She has removed and weighed livers and lungs. She isn’t shocked by the sight of death or injury but she isn’t ready for Susan’s vulnerability and how young she is. She’s small for nineteen, childlike, and dead and dumped … No one was punished for this. They did this to a young woman and they’re still out there, walking around, eating biscuits, drinking tea. having Christmases. She feels the injustice of it deep in her gut, the way Nikki must have for decades, a cross between fear and nausea. It’s wrong.

It’s not surprising that Margo, despite her revulsion, begins to think she ought to do something. But in a terrifying turn of the tables, she finds that opening the door to look into her past has made her the object of someone else’s threats and hatred. Is it an unrelated creep of some sort? Or does it have something directly to do with the pervert who killed her mother?

Mina’s touch with the dark, gritty, and disturbing is expert, and this book is a persuasive and frightening page-turner. Take the tender parts when they come, as Margo must: realizations of friendships, alliances across class lines despite not wanting them, friendships among women strong enough to fight off the men on hand, whether they are uselessly well-meaning or frighteningly violent.

There’s nothing pretty about reading The Less Dead. And it’s the slowly growing desperation that Margo finally embraces, for some kind of justice for her mother and for her own safety, that pulls the book forward. Still, Mina continues to offer the distaff side of the looking-glass world that began with the classic Glasgow noir of the late William McIlvanney: Crime always involves women, whether as victims, partners, or even perpetrators. In Mina’s capable hands, they raise their voices and speak out. At last.

PS: Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.  

Scottish Noir from T. Frank Muir, THE MEATING ROOM

I've enjoyed the very dark and well crafted St Andrews, Scotland, mysteries of T. Frank Muir; two of them came my way via Soho Crime (Hand for a Hand; Tooth for a Tooth). I've no idea why the latest to cross the Atlantic, THE MEATING ROOM, came out from Academy Chicago (Chicago Review Press) this month, but I grabbed the book and dove right in, checking out the investigation led by DCI Andy Gilchrist.

And it's a doozy. A wealthy property developer, Thomas Magner, loses his business partner to apparent suicide, at the same time that the partner's family is murdered. The connection looks obvious -- the suicide is remorse driven, right? But Gilchrist's partner DS Jessie Janes raises some initial doubts, and soon Gilchrist has his own. Still, it's hard to investigate Magner because any added attention to him looks like bias: He's already been charged with multiple sexual assaults. When the women who'd accused Magner begin either recanting or dying, Gilchrist and Janes race the clock to find both evidence and witnesses they can count on.

Back in the Office, Gilchrist's mobile rang -- a number he did not recognize.

He made the connection.

"DI Smith here, sir. Sorry to trouble you again, but I thought you should know that they're dropping like flies."

Gilchrist understood immediately. "Who is it this time?"

"Abbott, Warren, and Williamson. All by phone again."

"Reasons?"

"More or less the same. Jenna Abbott said she didn't want to go to court or even give her testimony. ... Change of heart."

Alert readers will know, early on, that the unfolding crimes are likely to increase in graphic gruesomeness. (The title also suggests this.) So, reader beware ... it's going to be tough. But Muir's deft exploration of how his investigators will react to the increasing pressure on them (including in Andy Gilchrist's private life) ramps the suspense up swiftly, and I didn't want to put the book down until the finale. Scottish aspects? Not many -- mostly a good modern British-style crime novel, well paced and well written.

Read one Muir, and you may well want to read some others -- but you don't need to cover these in sequence. Good stuff.

PS:  Looking for more mystery reviews, from cozy to very dark? Browse the Kingdom Books mysteries review blog here.

Brief Mention: Denise Mina, BLOOD SALT WATER

Dave and I mourned the death, earlier this month, of William McIlvanney, a Scottish crime writer whose work forms the classic bedrock of "tartan noir." McIlvanney's grim and gritty police procedurals laid out the conflicts of Scottish urban life and criminal investigation, including the perilous thread that complicates each investigation: that the criminal and the investigator may know each other already .... and may even be family.

This danger of "life in a small nation" provides a dark and disturbing undercurrent for investigator Alex Morrow in Denise Mina's newest Glasgow crime novel, BLOOD SALT WATER. The four earlier books in the series, most poignantly The Red Road, establish Morrow as a feisty and smart Detective Inspector in the Scottish police, with a half-brother who's a vicious career criminal. Morrow's already had to defend her family and her own career from the backwash of Danny's crimes and colleagues. Did you ever wish a family member would just, umm, die? Hard to blame Alex for the occasional thought.

That terrible sense of family shattered into unmatching pieces -- by lifestyle, religion, and money -- caroms among the criminals in BLOOD SALT WATER. Moreoever, Mina's insight deftly portrays the struggles of small-time crooks trying to avoid becoming hard cases -- as well as the manipulation and power of those who run the show.

Powerful, well paced, engaging, and dark (although not especially gory) -- the book's already been on many "best of the year" lists, and deserves it. Best option: Read the other four books first, for added depth. But if you don't have time just now, go right ahead into this newest. Mina's such a pro that you won't feel you've missed out. Let me know what you think, once you've reached the end.

A New Glasgow Crime Fiction Voice: Malcolm Mackay

Denise Mina. Tana French. William McIlvanney. Stuart Neville. Whether the setting is Ireland or urban Scotland, these authors authors bring us dark crime fiction that confronts the "other side" of British dominion: the long shadow of war and domination, whether invited or not, that seems to justify a bitter and violent response from a conquered culture.

On a recent trip "across the border" to Canada, Dave and I prowled the shelves at Brome Lake Books, looking for authors we might not have come across here in the States. The book I brought home was THE NECESSARY DEATH OF LEWIS WINTER by Malcolm Mackay. It's "Glasgow noir," told from the point of view of the criminal underworld -- but it's also a wonderful sort of "Heart of Darkness," tugging at the results of one "necessary" murder. There's an insistent intimacy to the way the characters show their lives, even told in the third person; who'd have guessed that sociopaths could seem so honorable and likeable? Ooops, it's fiction, right? (But think Whitey Bulger and you won't be far off.)

Mackay's books are spinning across the Atlantic, and at least the three that make up his Glasgow Trilogy are pretty easy to order; his fourth, The Night the Rich Men Burned, is harder to find at this point. But that's okay -- I devoured THE NECESSARY DEATH OF LEWIS WINTER and I'm glad to take my time adding the others to my shelf. Check out the author's website if you have a moment.

Denise Mina, THE RED ROAD: Alex Morrow #4, Gritty and Deep

A murder from 1997 -- solved but not really cleared away -- is going to dog Detective Inspector Alex Morrow's current effort to keep a mobbed-up murderer jailed in Glasgow. But she doesn't know it yet, as RED ROADS opens with her court testimony and an unlikely stirring of friendship with Anton Atholl, defense attorney for the notorious Michael Brown. In fact, it's Alex who's sweating and nervous in court this time, but she pulls herself together and does a competent job of testimony.

Back at her boss's office, a shocking discovery threatens to completely derail the case, though. The incarcerated defendant's fingerprints have just been identified -- at a current crime scene. Word of this could do much more than let Michael Brown off his current charges; it could derail all the past convictions related to him, as well as to the prints lab.

Mina ramps up the tension and emotion by exposing the reader, in chapters sandwiched between Alex's experience, to what took place when a 16-year-old sexually abused girl went to prison back in 1997 for a knifing murder -- on the same night that another such murder took place. It will be a long reach within the book's tense timeline until DI Alex Morrow realizes that there are people from the old case, tangentially involved with the new one.

This is the fourth Alex Morrow investigation (although it appears the publisher has "issues" around title number three and isn't mentioning it; go to the author website for the full listing, http://www.denisemina.com/writing). If you're already hooked on Mina's Glasgow noir, this one may be a hair gentler in terms of gore than others -- but emotionally it packs multiple punches and captures the double-binds of poverty and deprivation that feed back into cruelty. And if you haven't yet sampled Mina's other titles (which also include other investigators), this is actually a really good place to start, rich with imagery and layers of connection. I was sorry to turn the last page.

Scottish Noir: Frank Muir, TOOTH FOR A TOOTH

Glasgow, bitter weather, old grudges: T. Frank Muir takes the sour tang of a newly discovered corpse -- found in a shallow grave where it's intended to send a sharp message -- and weaves with one of life's worst nightmares: that a family member, now dead, could have been a killer. For DCI Andy Gilchrist, the criminal evidence being unearthed couldn't possibly point to his brother; he knew his brother well enough, even back in the early years of their adulthood, that he can be sure there's no murder involving his family.

And yet. Who could have predicted that the evidence would include a sign of the past that only Gilchrist knew about? Why is a psychic sniffing at the this --

"Tell me about your brother, Jack," she said without missing a beat.

Something shifted in Gilchrist's chest. "That's out of bounds," he grunted.

But Jack's death, an unsolved hit-and-run, haunts Gilchrist. And soon it's clear he won't have any standing in his own department unless he can figure out what happened "back then" and who was responsible ... and who is messing with the evidence even now.

This is Muir's third in a best-selling series that has reached four titles in Scotland -- Eye for an Eye, Hand for a Hand, this one, and then Life for a Life -- but is just the second to reach the US through the grace of Soho Crime (author website here: http://www.frankmuir.co.uk). Muir's books make up a dark but traditional crime series, without the taint of corruption that William McIvanney's books enfold. Friendships matter, and struggle, in the long run, is effective for Gilchrist. But he's got a lot to straighten out in his life. A psychic and a solved case or two won't resolve all that ... and a cold wind holds a hint of more losses and more pain to come. (Bring it on.)

Still, there's grace and goodness in Muir's TOOTH FOR A TOOTH. It's a fiercely good read. Best news: I'm guessing we'll get the next in the series, by December of this year.

Scottish Noir: William McIlvanney's LAIDLAW Is Back in Print

The Canongate re-issue.

A number of blog reviews are showing up this year for William McIlvanney's LAIDLAW, first of his three noted Glasgow (Scotland) crime novels: Laidlaw (1977), The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983), and Strange Loyalties (1991). The fresh attention is due to reprinting of the first (and presumably the others will follow) as a paperback, by Canongate, in Edinburgh, Scotland. A few copies are floating across the Atlantic, and I hope there will be more.

For newcomers to this pivotal work credited as the launch of today's "Scottish noir," here's a thorough article by Beth Dickson at the Association for Scottish Literary Studies (don't let the organization name put you off, as she provides a good summary of the three books): http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/scotlit/asls/Laverock-McIlvanney-2.html

And last Thursday the noted blog The Rap Sheet gave us part of a new interview with McIlvanney: http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2013/06/mcilvanney-calls-it-as-he-sees-it.html

If you're already a fan of the crime fiction by Quentin Jardine or Denise Mina, here's a good chance to check out the roots of their work. And if all these names are new to you, Kingdom Books provides an oveview here: http://kingdombks.blogspot.com/2008/06/scottish-mysteries-mcilvanney-mina.html

Hurrah for summer -- the season that justifies making a reading list and indulging!

Newest Scottish Noir: T. Frank Muir, HAND FOR A HAND

US cover

Scottish noir? Crime fiction fans know it's been around for a while; from William McIlvanney to Ian Rankin to Denise Mina to Quintin Jardine, this grim and often deeply satisfying group of authors and their books belongs on the shelves for savoring and re-reading. More established than Scandinavian noir, the tight geography and urban flavor of much of the group also means it's common to notice the connections among the authors, adding an extra level of intrigue to these books.

This year, 2012, is the first for a conference dedicated to Scottish noir: The BLOODY SCOTLAND conference was held in September, and I wish I'd been there -- what a range of authors and topics! Check it out here.

A few weeks ago, the first U.S. edition of HAND FOR A HAND by T. Frank Muir arrived, thank to Soho Crime bringing this author across the Atlantic. Muir already has three investigations in print in the United Kingdom, so we can expect to see the American versions arrive quickly.

UK cover

HAND FOR A HAND is Muir's debut crime novel, but well seasoned in writing style. How the author got there is hard to figure, as his website leaves his past well shrouded in mystery. That's fine with me, as long as the books keep coming! As this one opens, a frightening discovery on a golf course demands the attention of DCI Andy Gilchrist. There is, literally, an amputated hand in the sand bunker, clutching a note addressed to the investigator by name, and saying: Murder.

Against some views of protocol, Andy seems likely to become the senior investigating officer for this defacement of Scotland's golf-course reputation. But that slot turns out to stay with the Chief Superintendent after all. And what the Chief Superintendent decides, is not available for argument. That includes the infuriating, appalling assignment of Gilchrist's long-time enemy Ronnie Watts to the police team. "In this Division I don't want anyone to harbour past grievances," explains the Chief to Gilchrist. Bygones should be bygones.

But they really can't be, considering what's happened between the two men in the past. And as it turns out, most of Gilchrist's past and present life is at stake with a criminal who's determined to hurt him as much as possible -- over and over and over again.

With the intensity and pace of a Lee Child ticking-clock thriller, added to the insight and detailed police procedural style that Scottish noir so often features, Muir provides an action-packed investigation that will ruin your plans for the weekend. So change those plans -- it's urgent to read this one now, because there are at least two more lined up. Good reading ahead.

Alert for collectors: Muir's crime fiction covers include three forms of his name -- you can see see here, on the US and UK covers, both T. Frank Muir and Frank Muir; another UK one (see his website) reads T. F. Muir. As I said earlier: This is an author of mystery, in himself as well as his books.