Medicine, Money and Murder by Anne Pettigrew

In Medicine, Money and Murder, Anne Pettigrew continues to examine the murkier side of medical ethics she first explored in her debut novels, Not the Life Imagined and Not the Deaths Imagined. Her background as a GP gives her access to a deeper understanding of the nexus between care and self-interest and she uses it to vivid effect in her work. Previously she has given us a Harold Shipman-like character to examine the ease with which a serial killer can slip into the depths of evil. In Medicine, Money and Murder, she serves up another deliciously wicked villain but she also turns her attention to the baleful effects of big pharma, to equally chilling effect. 

It is 1971, and Mhairi MacLean, a naïve young woman from Scotland is working as an extern in the Ellis Memorial Hospital in New Jersey as part of a three month summer programme. Away from home for the first time, Mhairi is struck by the differences between Scotland and America, the sleek new multi-storey hospitals compared with the Victorian buildings she was accustomed to back home, the more relaxed lifestyle, the confidence of the people. 

Gradually, though, she comes to realise the differences between American and British healthcare are more profound than she could have imagined. In particular, she is shocked by the way in which the American healthcare system is driven by finance. She wrestles with her conscience as she realises the extent to which health insurance and money are primary considerations. “It’s funny how much clinical practice changes when money comes into it,” she says at one point as it becomes clear that the level and quality of care received by an individual is entirely dependent on their ability to pay, rather than their need. 

Further, the culture of litigation dictates medical practice to an unhealthy degree. The first thing to learn in medicine, she is told, is that “diagnoses can be hummingbirds or sparrows.” And missing a hummingbird would mean getting “your ass sued off”. As a result, patients were exposed to unnecessary scans and procedures, purely to head off any possibility of a medical suit. What happens if the patient can’t afford it, Mhairi asks. “When the bills run up, you get into debt and have to deal with it,” she is told. 

Medicine, Money and Murder is a crime novel, and the mystery begins when a patient being transferred from one hospital to another seemingly disappears. The receiving hospital has no record of her being admitted. Bureaucratic blunder? Or something else? 

As Mhairi and her friends begin to investigate, one person comes to interest them, Dr van Lindholm, a senior Renal specialist at Ellis Memorial, and someone who appears to wield an unhealthy amount of power. Even the hospital’s Medical Chief, Dr Harper, seems cowed by him. As Mhairi continues to observe Dr van Lindholm’s dealings she grows more and more concerned. 

Medicine, Money and Murder is an exciting and fast-paced novel. The crime element is well handled and the medical background Anne Pettigrew weaves in is never intrusive but rather adds a sense of verisimilitude. Mhairi, very much a fish out of water in big, brash America, gradually matures and develops, and proves very much a match for the vested interests arrayed against her.

Thoughts on the American election and democracy

 I gave up writing about politics a few years ago because I realised nothing I said or did would make any difference. Ironically, the fact that this stance has been vindicated is the reason I’ve decided to write something political again. I always was a contrarian.

Donald Trump has been re-elected President of the United States of America. A convicted criminal, sexual predator, sociopath, a man who encouraged a riotous assault on the American seat of government after losing a democratic election. A man who has already vowed revenge on his enemies. It’s extraordinary.

But utterly predictable. 

And the people who will be blamed for it – the American voters who fell, again, for Trump’s MAGA rhetoric, the poor and the disconnected of America – are not the ones who are responsible. The people responsible are the ones who are now sitting round their coffee tables weeping and sighing and crying “how could this have happened? What have these people done to us?”

The truth is – and I say this as a liberal – they have done the only thing they could do to be heard by people like us: they’ve thrown our arrogance and our certitude back in our faces, they have told us that they want to be listened to, they want their views reflected in national politics.

Way back in 1992, Benjamin Barber identified two axial principles of our age – globalism and tribalism – which, he said, may be threatening our democracy. ‘The planet is falling precipitantly apart AND coming reluctantly together at the very same moment,’ he said. This was prescient at the time, an analysis of the contrasting neoconservative view on one side and cosmopolitan idealism on the other. Thirty-two years later, this conflict appears to be reaching some kind of climax.

Samuel P Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations theory, first posited in 1993, suggested that the post-Cold war world order would be characterised by clashes where ‘the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.’ The fundamental source of conflict, he suggested, would no longer be ‘primarily ideological or primarily economic’, but cultural. It could be argued that future events – 9/11, the Iraq War, Afghanistan – bore out his view, with deadly clashes between Western liberalism and Islamic fundamentalism dominating global politics in the decades that followed, but his central thesis was weak. He paid lip service to civilisations other than Western, Islamic and Sinic (to the extent he couldn’t even decide how many civilisations there were in total, the number depending on whether African civilisation could be considered more than a ‘possibility’, an assertion which is, frankly, racist). For that reason, liberals disregarded Huntington’s views as reactionary and ignored him. 

Ignoring people who don’t agree with them is a liberal characteristic that has now reached its baleful yet inevitable conclusion. 

A further work by Huntington in 2004, Who Are We?, further reinforced Liberal opposition, with its view that Latino immigration in America could ‘divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages.’ His solution was to return to America’s Anglo-Protestant beginnings, forcing immigrants to embrace the culture of the US that was established by its founding fathers. As a Scot, familiar with the schisms and schisms-within-schisms of Protestantism, its inability to ever agree on anything, its tendency to ever-increasing dogmatism, the idea that there is a single Protestant worldview that could drive a harmonious culture seems naïve in the extreme.

Huntington’s ideas, then, were wrong. 

And yet.

And yet the issue of immigration has not gone away. Rather, it has worsened. And that bothers people. Millions of them. 71.5 million of them, in yesterday’s poll. But the Liberal elite are not listening. They never do. And in that vacuum something sinister is happening. In the end, the real clash of civilisations is not between the West and Islam, but between neighbours, families, communities. Between liberals and conservatives. Between us and them. And we saw the outcome last night.

Martha Nussbaum, that eminent proponent of cosmopolitanism, regularly quotes Diogenes the Cynic – ‘I am a citizen of the world’ – to promote her view that an ‘individual’s primary allegiance is to the community of human beings in the entire world.’ It’s a worthy view, one that you see promoted with varying degrees of saccharine sentimentality daily on Twitter. Cosmopolitanism is essentially a thesis based on idealism, whose totem is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which sets out the rights and freedoms which should be expected by all citizens of the world. At its most idealistic, cosmopolitanism sees a shift away from the nation state as the predominant model. Anthony Giddens even suggested that an elected second chamber of the United Nations might one day be feasible. For Ralf Dahrendorf, such a concept of ‘global democracy’ was akin to ‘howling at the moon.’

Yet still we howl.

To return (reluctantly, I’m a liberal after all) to Huntington, he coined the term ‘Davos Man’, named after the World Economic Forum which meets annually in Davos, Switzerland, a self-selecting global economic elite who see ‘little need for national loyalty’ and who could be accused of trying to make decisions and change the world without any degree of accountability to ordinary citizens. It is fundamentally undemocratic, yet the WEF’s power is considerable. Alongside the WEF, Benjamin Barber identified non-elected, unanswerable trans-national organisations such as international banks, global news agencies and NGOs which wield disproportionate power. As long ago as 2004, Daniele Archibugi was warning that these could become a ‘trojan horse enabling technocrats to prevail over democratic control.’

Well, it wasn’t the technocrats who won the US election last night. Nor was it the fascists, as many claim. It was the oligarchs. The USA, like Russia, is now an oligarchy. Still one rooted in democracy for now, but an oligarchy all the same. Elon Musk now wields true political power. Power has been bought. It will be used. How was this allowed to happen?

Cosmopolitan utopias mean nothing in the Rust Belt. In Appalachia. In cities devastated by economic downturn. Time and again, voters asked for help. They didn’t get it. Then a corrupt, venal, orange, self-serving oligarch offered them what they wanted. Reduced immigration. Import tariffs to protect local producers. America great again. He won’t deliver on any of that – he doesn’t care – but it doesn’t matter because now he has claimed power. He has beaten the Liberal elite because the Liberal elite was too arrogant to listen, too sure that it had all the answers, too smug to concede that ordinary voters had legitimate concerns. I have no doubt a liberal approach would be best, Kamala Harris would have made a more effective President, America has made a dangerous date with fundamentalism, but that doesn’t matter. It’s happened. They (we) lost.

There is a direct lesson here for the UK. This is a warning we should not ignore. Earlier this year the British public voted overwhelmingly to reject the prevailing political approach. The Tories’ self-interest and greed and corruption was swept out of power and the Labour Party was entrusted with an enormous mandate. A mandate to change Britain.

Not a mandate to behave like the Tories, only a little bit more competent and a little less corrupt. Not a mandate to carry on ignoring the concerns of the majority because they don’t chime with the views of the minority elite.

And yet, here we are, with Starmer’s Conservative-lite government peddling the same rubbish because they cannot accept – simply find it impossible to conceive – that their shibboleths, their worldview, their certainty, might somehow not be the answer to the problem after all.

Meanwhile, political extremism is marshalling its resources. Political pygmies like Robert Jenrick give themselves a hard-on by talking of pulling Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights – our means of enacting the cosmopolitan ideals of the UDHR – and we scoff because he’s not in power and we are. But the day will come, my friend. The day will come. In a year’s time, in two, in three, if the Labour government does not tackle the issues that the voting public consistently tell us concern them, these people will turn their backs on conventional politics. The fringe – Reform, or perhaps something even worse – will become their refuge. And, like the oligarch over the water, the undesirables will be voted into power. And then what?

It doesn’t matter that you may not agree with people’s views on immigration, on net zero, on culture wars, on policing and crime. You can lock them up for rioting but unless you address the root causes of that rioting – a deep and lingering sense of disenfranchisement – the rioting will return, redoubled. We can’t ignore this. Because if we democrats won’t deal with these people’s concerns, they will turn away from democracy, just as America has, just as states throughout Europe are doing. 

The sadness is that all of this happened before, in the 1930s. We didn’t learn then, and we know what happened.

Will we learn now?

Salvage by Mark Baillie

When I was a bairn, back in the seventies, every year at tattie-howkin time the Meadows in Crieff, my home town, used to be taken over by Scots Travellers in their vans and caravans, dozens of them. They’d converge on Crieff for the howkin and then disperse again a couple of weeks later. When I was very young, seven or eight, my mother used to warn me away, saying the “tinks” would carry me off and I’d never be seen again. I’ve never understood why my mother chose to frighten me like that. She knew it wasn’t true, and indeed, when she was a girl she used to play with Traveller children herself, among them the mother of Jess Smith, the eminent writer. She would get beaten by her faither for doing so. 

I now understand that, from the 1900s to the 1960s, the reality was that the only children in danger of being taken away were children of the Travellers, many of them subjected to enforced removal by “the social” – social services backed up by police – and ripped from their families forever. The lucky ones – under fives – would be put up for adoption. Older children would be sent to work. The middle age group were the ones who suffered most, ending up in religious or local authority-run children’s homes where they were routinely beaten and abused and left with little hope of a good life. 

I discovered this through reading Mark Baillie’s brilliant new novel, Salvage, published by Tippermuir Books. Set in 1983, it takes as its focus the enforced removal of a six-year-old girl, Jenny Lacklow from her family in a Traveller campsite in Carluke in 1929. Her brother, Nash, a few years older than Jenny, witnessed the removal, and the ferocious fight put up by his mother to protect Jenny, the violence, police using billy clubs to beat the Travellers back while the Social people removed a child from its family and ripped the family asunder. 

In 1983, the now elderly Nash is told he is dying. Thoughts of mortality lead him to revisit the past and he decides he wants to find out about his little sister. Where did she go? What life did she have? Was she still alive? His nephew, Spence, thinks this is a bad idea, but Nash enlists Spence’s daughter, Emma to help him. Emma is at university, the first in the family to do so, and she’s smart. She’ll be able to find Jenny, surely? And so begins an absolutely fascinating – and at times heartbreaking, at other times uplifting – adventure. 

There is a lot in the novel about truth. Emma’s university professor says during one of her classes: “When it came to the telling of history, truth was a complicated business.” Edna O’Brien, who died the day I wrote this review, once noted: “History is said to be written by the victors. Fiction, by contrast, is largely the work of injured bystanders.” This is a truth picked up on in his poetry by the great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, who talked of the difference between received history and lived experience – what’s in the history books and what people felt as they experienced life. MacLean was referring to the Highlanders and Islanders who were cleared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or the Irish who fled the famine. Scots Travellers, too, have endured traumas over the generations and their voices have gone equally unheard. The official records, such as they were, would list that a child had been taken into care for the good of its health, to protect it from illness and deprivation and abject poverty. That official record did not talk about a covert but concerted campaign to obliterate the Traveller lifestyle, to ensure that Traveller encampments could be broken up and “trouble makers” (in the official argot) could be moved on. Truth? Truth is what people can be made to believe. Ask Donald Trump. 

Emma and Nash and Spence come up against the truth time and again. And, time and again, they are on the wrong side of the narrative, cast as the ones at fault, the modern day trouble makers. It is an insidious thing, the way a society can see what it wants to see and ignore what is inconvenient. Privilege is at the heart of it. Protest is easy when you have a safe, warm bed to return to afterwards. Emma, Nash and Spence, Travellers by descent, now live in static homes but they are still outsiders. The law, truth, is different for them. 

The trouble is, the powers that be always believe themselves to be right. They are the upholders of faith, decency, honesty, truth. They run the system, and the system controls everyone. 

Nash talks about and seems to see “the Social” as if it is a “mindless machine”, a “depersonalised system of the state” but Emma is more curious about the faceless people behind the machine. Who were the men who would rip an infant from her family? What possessed them to do such a thing? 

She tracks down evidence of Dr Banks, a 1920s public health official who talked about the need to take Traveller children into care. It was a matter of public health, he said: “tinker sites are unhygenic – and what does a tinker do but travel? … they spread their muck and waste and … this is what creates disease.” Dr Banks had weighed the matter up, he said, and removing Traveller children was “not only the right thing to do, it is the Christian thing to do.” The “Social”, then, was delivering a public good. And how do you fight that? 

Salvage is a wonderful book, part mystery, part historical record, part social study, part political analysis. It is immensely readable but genuinely thought-provoking. The characters of Nash, Emma and Spence live and breathe on the page. This could easily have turned into an exercise in didacticism, the characters becoming weary saints battling an alien system, but Mark Baillie’s acute characterisation brings them to life, flaws and all. He doesn’t offer easy answers for our injured bystanders, but he does offer hope. Lots of that. 

And that’s enough to be going on with. 

 

The World's End Murders by Tom Wood

For 37 years, the World’s End murders were a stain on Scotland’s collective conscience, the unsolved rapes and killings of two young women, seventeen years old and out one evening in Edinburgh’s Old Town for a bit of fun. There have been other unsolved crimes over the years but these two somehow struck a chord. When justice was finally dispensed in 2014 it felt, for the country, like a liberation. 

Tom Wood was heavily involved in the case in the middle and later years of the investigation, acting at one stage as the senior investigating officer. For Wood, and for many, if not all, the individuals involved in the investigation, there was always a feeling that the World’s End murders were special, and it was imperative that somehow, some time, the case must be resolved and the perpetrators held to account. 

The basic story will be familiar to anyone with a general awareness of recent Scottish history but Wood’s intimate knowledge of the case allows him to present a gripping and detailed recreation of the various stages of the investigation from the initial enquiry, through the various advances in DNA technology over the course of thirty years, to the breakthrough which finally, belatedly, secured a conviction. 

Wood paints a picture of police investigations in those early days which were characterised by dogged and dedicated individuals working together but hampered by a lack of technology. All information was manually recorded on index cards and filed in an enormous physical database. The chance of oversight – missing a single, vital piece of information among tens of thousands of records – was so high as to be almost an inevitability. 

The case went cold. Occasional advances offered the prospect of a breakthrough – for example, a prisoner in Saughton Jail reported that a cellmate had confessed to the murders – but these led nowhere and the investigation dragged on. Gradually, it was scaled down, though never closed. 

However, although those early detectives could not solve the case, they laid the groundwork for their successors, in future years, to profitably take up the mantle. That the case was eventually solved was as much down to those early detectives as it was to the advances in DNA which led to the final breakthrough. 

DNA was unknown in 1977. The idea that minute traces of evidence could reveal enough genetic information to identify, at odds of one in a billion, a single perpetrator, must have seemed like science-fiction. And yet the detectives in the World’s End case knew that, some time in the future, that is exactly what would happen. The World’s End murders would never have been solved if it hadn’t been for enlightened detectives who knew that scientific advances would come, and that therefore evidence had to be preserved in a pristine condition for examination when that day arrived. Every piece of evidence relating to the case was stored in secure and sterile conditions, which meant that when DNA did offer the chance of identifying the culprits, the raw materials existed in a shape which allowed them to be scientifically examined. It was a remarkable leap of faith by those officers and we owe them a debt of gratitude. 

All of this is relayed by Wood in fascinating detail. DNA was first used in the World’s End murders enquiry in 1988. It would be twenty-six years before it finally brought the truth. There was no single revelation, no immediate breakthrough. Rather, DNA technology advanced and the investigation advanced with it, gradually creating a more and more reliable DNA profile. Eventually, one name emerged. 

Angus Sinclair.

His name is now notorious but, even then, he was known to the officers in the case. He had recently stood trial for murder in Glasgow and had a prolific history of violent sexual crime, including abduction. 

By this time, Sinclair was in prison for a series of sexual assaults on women and girls. Far from any cliched image of a sexual predator, though, he projected the image of a model prisoner, trustworthy and hard-working. This must have presented particular difficulties for the detectives interviewing him – how to reconcile the fact that Sinclair was a violent sexual predator with the calm and seemingly pleasant man before them? Sinclair had a highly developed ability to deceive and dissemble. Those of us who have never been in such circumstances can never know what it must be like to undertake such interviews, and the skill of those who do, the psychological acuity they must require, cannot be underestimated. 

Tom Wood makes the interesting observation that, unlike what we see in TV dramas, senior detectives do not undertake such interviews and, indeed, are not best placed to do so. Lower ranking officers, with recent experience of interviewing and well-versed in the psychological techniques required, are much better placed to undertake high-pressure interviews such as that of Angus Sinclair. 

In addition to Sinclair, the police had always known that there was a second attacker. Again, DNA provided the vital clue to his identity and the way this was done is astonishing, so convoluted that if you read it in a crime novel you would shake your head at the improbability of it. Yet it happened. 

But the real villain of the piece is Sinclair. Tom Wood calls him the embodiment of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, that duality of good and evil that has provoked so much analysis of the Scottish psyche for 130 years. 

This case clearly means a huge amount to Tom Wood. Once a policeman always a policeman, and there is no question that cases such as these, where the deaths of innocents go unpunished, must be very difficult to manage. Tom Wood’s approach throughout this book is impeccable: he seeks to determine the facts, of course, but he also looks to understand what went well in the investigation and where they fell short. He wants to understand Sinclair so he can consider what they could have done to stop him. It’s probably the case that we can never, ever understand the mind of someone as evil as Angus Sinclair but, in this forensic study of a crime, an investigation and a trial, Tom Wood comes as close as anyone. This is a highly personal and deeply impressive book. 

One of the final points that Tom Wood makes is perhaps the most compelling. “Families matter,” he says. He dedicates the book to Helen and Christine and the other victims of Sinclair, known and unknown, but he also dedicates it to “the families and friends who are left behind.” This understanding of the impact serious crime has on families and friends is something we have come to acknowledge in the near-fifty years since the World’s End murders took place, and the world is a better place for that.

The World's End Murders can be purchased here

The Paris Peacemakers by Flora Johnston

 

The timeframe for my fiction series begins in 1935 and I am now writing about the Second World War. The global political situation of the 1930s is central to my work, in particular the economic depression and the concomitant rise of extreme right-wing populism, leading to the sad inevitability of what happened in September 1939 and all that flowed from that. A warning from history, you might say, for people who believe the venal spoutings of Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage and co, and can’t see the banal repetition of history unfolding in front of us.

 

All of that, the political strife in Europe in the 1930s and the economic collapse of the 1920s that preceded it, can in part be traced back to the Treaty of Versailles at the conclusion of the Great War. What was meant to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reframe the world order for peace and harmony across nations and ages became a mendacious exercise in punishment and greed.

 

This makes the backdrop for Flora Johnston’s second novel, The Paris Peacemakers, a particularly engrossing one for me. Everything she writes about in 1919 Paris, as the Allies try to forge a peace treaty in the aftermath of the German surrender, leads directly to the grim circumstances that inform the political context of my novels. Flora brings to life in an extraordinary way the mistakes and arrogance and self-interest which set the world firmly on a path that led to Hitler and Stalin, and Putin and Xi.

 

This is a political novel, then, but it is also an intensely personal one. The search for a better political future conducted by Woodrow Wilson and the participants at the International Peace Conference is mirrored in the novel by a search for a better personal future by its three main protagonists, all of whom are seeking a compromise with the past and passage to a more hopeful world.

 

Stella Rutherford is a young woman from Thurso, in the north of Scotland, who takes up a secretarial position at the talks in Versailles which aim to fashion the finished peace treaty. Her older sister, Corran, is a classicist, at a time when women were not expected to concern themselves with abstruse subjects such as Latin. The third main character is Rob, Corran’s fiance, a Scottish rugby internationalist and surgeon who enlists during the war and is traumatised by his experiences.

 

Indeed, the experience of war underpins the drama, with each of the central characters affected by it in different ways. Stella struggles to overcome the grief she feels over the death of her beloved brother Jack, killed on the Western Front but constantly in her thoughts, a ghost from better days.

 

Corran battles with the knowledge that, as a woman, her life has been circumscribed by men and mores. She could take her exams at Cambridge but not graduate. She could work, but only until she married. She would be a wife, and a mother, and produce the next generation of leaders and attendants, men and women, perpetuating the status quo. She wants to fashion a different future.

 

Rob, his psyche ravaged by his experiences as a surgeon at the battlefront, is not yet sure he even believes in a future. In a moment of clarity, he sees the “blessed silence on the Western Front was likely no more than a pause.”

 

This observation is central to the novel. The Treaty of Versailles was the greatest – or perhaps worst – missed opportunity in human history, a moment when the world could have been reset but chose instead to protect the interests of the existing elite, to perpetuate the narrow, bigoted worldview of the western, white, male establishment. Women’s voices were largely excluded from the discussions at Versailles. The views of non-western nations were peripheral. The conference became an echo chamber and, inexorably, the optimistic aims with which it began withered and died.

 

This self-interested bigotry is expertly explored. The casual sexism that both Corran and Stella endure, and that is endemic in the society of the time, is an underlying theme which builds throughout the novel until we understand that such bigotry is not simply small-minded, or ignorant, or self-serving, but positively dangerous.

 

Given what we know, it would be easy for a novel about the treaty negotiations to become bleak and depressing. Flora Johnston’s The Paris Peacemakers is assuredly not that. Her blending of the political and the personal, the macro and the micro, polity and morality, creates a story which is emotional and engaging. Her characters come to life on the page and we urge them on in their quest for something better, something brighter.

 

Something different.

 

This is a very fine piece of writing by a novelist who in her two novels to date has shown a breadth of vision and ambition which is exciting and refreshing.

Observations on the Ringwood Publishing Writing Competition 2023

 

For the past three years I’ve been lucky enough to be a judge in the Ringwood Publishing short story competition. I’ve written about the stories in the first two years before but this year we had a bumper entry and a few common themes emerged. The following comments are not intended to be critical – the standard this year was very high – but hopefully I can offer some pointers to help authors in future years.

The biggest issue that struck me this year – in terms of the sheer number of stories which fell into this category – is that so many of them feel oddly distanced. A lot of action is relayed to us second-hand, in retrospect, all described through omniscient narration, rather than the point of view of a main character. It’s like most of the action takes place outside the story. In extreme cases, the story actually reads like a summary of the story. This happened. That happened. Then this. That means the reader can’t get involved. There is a lack of immediacy, of connection, of drama. And, ultimately, of interest.

Books on writing craft talk about starting in medias res, in the middle of events. This is the problem with the stories I’m talking about here. We’re never in the moment, living the scene as it unfolds. We’re hearing about it afterwards, or from the margins, from a distance. We’re never with the characters as their lives unfold.

In medias res is vital for the opening of your story and, again, a lot of stories this year suffered from weak openings. Looking through my notes, in story after story I’ve written “first paragraph could be removed” or even “first page is redundant”. In maybe a dozen stories, there was actually a brilliant first line, except it wasn’t in the first line, it was buried at the bottom of paragraph three or four. If everything up to that point was cut, we would have a very powerful opening. So read your stories again. Is there a stand-out sentence, something like the famous Iain Banks line, “It was the day my grandmother exploded”? There were genuinely a few examples of equally striking lines in this year’s stories, and if they’d been the opening lines the stories would have been immeasurably improved.

Too often, though, the introduction was devoted to a description of a scene, or backstory (which the reader isn’t going to care about because we aren’t invested in any characters yet) or explanations of who the characters are or, worst of all, a character preparing to do something – getting dressed, walking to a destination or the like. The story needs to start where the drama starts. Character and plot then flow from there.

In many stories, the main character was well-described and felt like a real person, but the characters around them were little more than names (and, in some cases, not even that). A lot of characters seemed to be there purely to move the plot forward, without contributing anything themselves. Every character should have a purpose, and the reader should have a sense of what all the principal players are like as individuals.

A lot of this can be done through dialogue and some stories missed opportunities here. This is linked to the point I made about stories feeling distanced. If we found things out through dialogue, rather than an omniscient narrator telling us, that pulls us into the story and makes it feel real. It is much better for a reader to gradually understand the thematic point the writer is looking to make from the characters talking to one another than to have it explained through omnisicient narration.

However, read your dialogue out loud. Does it sound like something a real person would actually say? If all you’re doing is taking a lump of omniscient narration and putting it in quote marks, that doesn’t make it dialogue.

A bald truth is that a lot of stories weren’t ready for submission. It was frustrating that quite a few stories which had the potential to be excellent were submitted before they’d been adequately edited. Let me tell you a giveaway. Whatever the word limit is for a competition – ours was 3000 – there will always be a high percentage of stories that come in ten words or fewer below that limit. I always check the word count before I start reading and this is an immediate red flag. It isn’t always the case, of course, but often it does mean that a writer has edited their story just enough to get it under the limit. That usually means there’s a lot more editing still to be done. Redundancy, cliché, repetition. They will all be in your early drafts and that’s fine. No one has ever written a superb first draft. But you should be refining and reworking your words over and over until only the most precise and perfect ones remain. There are several stories this year that I would like to see again, after proper editing.

I got the impression that half a dozen or so entries were excerpts from novels. There is nothing wrong with that. I’ve won a few competitions with stories that were taken from my first novel Cloudland and, indeed, our winning story last year was adapted from a novel which Ringwood Publishing liked so much it will be publishing this year.

But, if you do this, the short story you write is a completely different entity from the novel from which it’s been adapted, and you must read it with completely fresh eyes. Things you know from the novel are unknown to the reader of the story. Either explain them or, if they don’t add anything to the smaller scale of the plot, remove them. In one story, a character called Mary utters one line and never appears again. In the novel, she is probably a clear and important character, but in the short story she is an inexplicable presence. Who is she and why is she there? The story has to work in its own right, so you will have to change some things.

I hope I’ve managed to indicate some technical points which could help tighten your writing. But the final point I want to make is this: take risks. Don’t play safe. Don’t write something that’s already been written. If you want to write a Saki-esque story that’s fine, but make it your Saki-esque story, not a parody of the real thing. If you want to write a gritty Scots-dialogue drama, great but leave the Irvine Welshisms to Irvine Welsh. If you want to be experimental, experiment. You only have 3000 words to make your story stand out. That means every one of them has to do something important.

Good luck to everyone who ever writes a story and submits it to a competition. If you didn’t succeed this time, don’t give up. Every time you sit down and write you’re learning and improving. Your words matter. Let the world read them.

 

Sadie, Call The Polis by Kirkland Ciccone

Occasionally, you come across a character who, from the first page, feels like an old friend. Louise Welsh’s Rilke is one such, as is Janet in Elspeth Barker’s O Caledonia (albeit she’s almost completely insufferable). There’s an effortlessness about the characterisation and a vividness to the voice, a sense that these people are real, that their weaknesses (and they really, really need to have weaknesses) are just as important as their strengths, that their stories are the only thing you want to be concerned with at this very moment.

I’ve been writing long enough to know that the apparent effortlessness in such portrayals is actually the product of an enormous amount of effort, so I commend Kirkland Ciccone for the creation of the absolutely splendid Sadie Relish.

We first meet Sadie in primary school in the long, hot summer of 1976 when she responds to a teacher’s question in class by saying: “When I grow up, I want to be a prostitute just like my mither.” Sadie, then, is a naïve and guileless young girl, a loner in search of magic in the world, unpopular at school and unhappy at home. She is also a wonderful and witty observer of daily life and the blackness of the comedy rings wonderfully true coming through the voice of this honest, decent, caring, sometimes broken young girl.

She is surrounded by a supporting cast that is equally strong and diverse. Her mother, the aforementioned prostitute, is hard-as-nails, exactly the sort of woman you wouldn’t want to have move in next door to you, but someone who, in her own way, loves and cares for her family deeply. Her sister is older, thinks she is wiser, is probably far less so, and the siblings have an authentically troubled relationship through the years. Troubles subsist with her best friend, Gregor, too, and he slides out of the story early only to return, much transformed later on.  

And transformation is an important element in Sadie, Call the Polis. Time, as it does, changes everything. We follow Sadie’s progression from gauche schoolgirl to a mother with her own, definitely troubled children and a welter of cares of her own. Some are life-threatening, some life-changing, and gradually, you come to realise that the familiar and seductive voice of this best friend Sadie has been fooling you (and herself) all along, and the novel has a much darker underbelly than you realised. 

Sadie, Call the Polis is a terrific black comedy, in which serious issues are explored in a highly original way. The humour and the dialogue are classically Scottish, dry as toast, the characters and their outlooks seemingly hard and tough but displaying, if you choose to see it, a warmth and tenderness they won’t admit they crave but do all the same. This is very assured writing and a very fine novel of growing up. 

Liberties by Peter Bennett

Peter Bennett’s motivation for writing Liberties, he tells the Big Bearded Bookseller in a recent interview, was to be able to tell a story set in the east end of Glasgow with characters with working class voices. These are a rarity in literature, he says, and he’s not wrong, sadly, although there may be tentative signs of an upswing, with a new generation of writers like Emma Grae, Colin Burnett and Kirkland Ciccione taking up the mantle of Irvine Welsh and James Kelman and unapologetically exploring working class heritage (and humour). 

Liberties, then, is set in Shettleston in the late nineties, at the start of the New Labour government, when it was already becoming obvious that, whatever it said on the political tin, it was the same old shite inside. Poverty is a constant, as are the options for escaping it, as are the consequences of those options. 

What appears, at first, to be a series of picaresque adventures featuring a disparate set of characters, gradually coalesces into a single narrative structure pulled together by those powerful working class themes of poverty, family ties and an unerring ability to make desperately poor life decisions. 

Arthur Coyle is a pensioner, friend of Tam and grandfather of Danny. All three, in different ways, are heavily involved with a local loan shark and villain, Harry Mullin. Also in thrall to Mullin is Stevie, a clever and capable young musician in danger of being sucked into a spiral of drugs and petty crime and trouble. This being Scotland in the 1990s, the future looks bleak for all of them but Peter Bennett’s exciting, funny and ultimately moving novel charts a steady path, avoiding clichés and stereotypes, maintaining a sense of realism but leavening it with humour, and creating a cast of characters who are realistic and well drawn, about whom the reader comes to care, and whose stories are genuinely stirring. 

Liberties is highly recommended.

Blasted Things by Lesley Glaister

 

I remember buying and reading Lesley Glaister’s early works when I was a stock librarian in the nineties. As is often the case, I was initially attracted by the covers (Digging to Australia, I think, had a Paula Rego painting and that was my introduction to her) and  I found Glaister’s writing immersive and intriguing. When I stopped being a librarian I read less and lost touch with Lesley Glaister until Blasted Things, published by Sandstone Press. I’m delighted to have re-made her acquaintance.

The first section of the novel is set in a field station on the Western Front during World War One in 1917. Clementina Armstrong – Clem – is an auxiliary volunteer nurse and we begin to understand that an interesting back story has led this young woman to such a difficult and dangerous assignment. She is engaged to be married to a doctor but already has doubts – not so much about her fiance Dennis but about marriage itself, the institution, the life that awaits a young woman in Edwardian England. Her experiences in the casualty station, the young men who pass through her care – some surviving, many not – reinforce her doubts.

And then she meets Powell Bonneville, a Canadian doctor, and those doubts, doubts which she has tried to hide deep in her psyche erupt into the open.

Life turns. War over, we rejoin Clem in 1920, now married to Dennis, with a son and a new life and the bright future that everyone in Britain, fatigued by war and death, aspires to have. This was a peculiar time, euphoria and relief and hope in the immediate aftermath of the war not yet eclipsed by the inevitable recession and social crises that would follow later in the decade.

For Clem, this transition from hope to gloom comes early and bites hard. Those doubts she harboured have never gone away, and a combination of post-natal depression, (obviously undiagnosed) PTSD from her experiences at the front and the growing realisation that her life was, indeed, to be girdled by convention leave her morose and marooned, her life circumscribed: more children would follow, the doctor and his little lady becoming pillars of the community, she on his hand, smiling, projecting radiance through her slow descent into middle age and on, the inevitable arrival of grandchildren, infirmity, decline. 

Only Dennis’s sister, the free spirit Harri, seems to offer any escape from the stultification of Edwardian society. Harri’s husband died in the war and, despite Dennis’s attempts to have her return to the family bosom, she steadfastly retains her own household and, through that, her own identity. Returning from Harri’s to the family home is a stinging experience for Clem, a reminder of what she had hoped her life might encompass.

In this state of mental turmoil she meets Vincent, a man badly disfigured during the war, with a tin plate hiding the damage to his face. A brittle relationship develops, and here the novel twists into remarkable new territory, these damaged and yearning characters, in most regards utterly mis-matched but each recognising in the other some deep-rooted need, coming to life before us on the page. As a character study it is remarkable, beautifully handled, the pair’s arguments and misconceptions and overreactions rendered all too human through the realism of their depiction.

This section of the novel reminded me strongly of Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, set in 1939, immediately before the war. Like Blasted Things, it is an intriguing character study based around unhappy and needy and disconnected people. There is in it an underlying sense of decay – social and moral – which is only hinted at in Blasted Things. The trajectory is clear, then: from 1920s Blasted Things to Hangover Square in 1939, this is how British society is going to develop, this is where we are headed. Hamilton had the advantage of writing his novel almost contemporaneously, of course, reflecting the zeitgeist around him. Glaister’s ability to enter the psyche of the fractured 1920s is impressive indeed.

In an interview, Glaister said of her work: “It doesn’t really fit into any genre. Is it historical? Is it a romance? Is it a psychological thriller?’ 

She wondered if this might somehow be a problem but for me the opposite is true: it is a strength. The novel twists the way it chooses and Glaister, the author, follows. It could have gone in a particular direction during and after the first section, in the field hospital. It didn’t. It defied convention and became something different. Difference continues throughout the novel. Nothing is predictable. Nothing is straightforward. The novel becomes more than the sum of its parts, a vivid evocation of time and period, emotion and character.

Man at Sea by Liam Bell

Man at Sea is told in two time frames, in 1941 in Malta, with the citizens enduring a Nazi and Italian bombardment, and in 1961, when Stuart, a pilot shot down and badly burned in the war returns to settle business – of his own and of his travelling partner, Beth, the nurse who cared for him while his horrific burns were tended in the aftermath of the downing. This is a beautifully paced book where the action feels steady and unforced but where, all the same, we are drawn relentlessly to a satisfying climax. 

What is most impressive about the book is the way that it gradually reveals the intimate relations of the protagonists, allowing a gentle love story to unfold, while at the same time generating the intrigue and excitement of a thriller. It’s something William Boyd does particularly well, and Sebastian Faulks. Liam Bell is clearly a gifted writer. 

In the wartime passages we have eleven-year-old Joe Zarb, living with his nanna while his father is on active duty in the Royal Navy. Joe is a bright lad, but he has a vivid imagination and he is naïve. This is drawn out delightfully with a series of word definitions that begin each chapter. Joe’s papa, Victor, did this and Joe treasures the notebooks in which his father carefully transcribed new words. Naturally, Joe tries to do the same thing but his definitions are wittily skewed, such as: 

Encrypt (verb): to hide information or important messages from enemy spies, using the locked room underneath the parish church. 

At one point, the Zarbs receive a telegram and, although Joe doesn’t get to read it, he becomes convinced it brings news of his father’s death. When he searches his nanna’s room and finds it, he discovers that his father has remarried, to an English woman called Elizabeth Blanch. This feels almost like a mini-bereavement to Joe: will his father return or will he stay with his new wife? What will their relationship be? For Joe, eleven and too young to understand, the news is difficult to assimilate. 

Meanwhile, the Sultanas, a family of refugees from Sliema, come to live with the Zarbs. In the second strand of the novel, set twenty years later, Joe has married the youngest of the Sultana children, Rosaria, little more than an infant in 1941. 

The second strand focuses on Stuart Mallinson, the disfigured pilot. He agrees to accompany his former nurse Elizabeth (Beth) Blanch to Malta. It is Beth, of course, who married Joe’s father, and although Victor later died in service, she decides finally she wishes to see her stepson. Stuart, too, has his reasons for returning to Malta: he is convinced that the accident which downed his Hurricane was not what is seemed, but an act of sabotage, and he is determined to find and kill the perpetrator. Stuart, though, has strong feelings for Elizabeth, and the urge to love and the urge for revenge set up a duality in him that he struggles to resolve. 

The story is told plainly, in fine and unflowery prose, creating a dolorous mood which suits the plot and the characters very well. It’s an impressively restrained novel, a hymn to resilience and love.

The Knitting Station by Kirsti Wishart

This is the basic plot of Kirsti Wishart’s The Knitting Station: at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a woman who worked at Bletchley Park as a code breaker during the war has suffered a breakdown and is in care. Along with a group of other patients she is taken to a remote Scottish island as a rest cure. There, she becomes convinced the Russians are about to invade the island as a prelude to a full-scale invasion of the UK. Is this just another delusion created by her troubled mind or has she stumbled on a genuine plot? Can she believe the evidence of her own eyes? And, more importantly, will anyone believe what she says? 

All very interesting, you’re probably thinking, although perhaps a little Hitchcockian, formulaic. You can imagine the film version, Sigourney Weaver in the title role, the CGI, the fast cuts, tension ratcheting notch by notch until at the end Sigourney smashes through a window to confront the baddies and save the day. Job done. 

So, you might imagine, you can pretty much guess how this book is going to pan out. But, if that’s what you think, I can tell you that you’re very wrong. How do you explain the psychotic sheep? The secret plans hidden in cunning knitting patterns? The soldiers dressed as models? The magic mushroom stovies? Paramilitary knitters packing pistols? Point to any of those ideas in Hitchcock or Jason Bourne. 

Or anything for that matter. 

In an interview with Alistair Braidwood Kirsti Wishart comments on the shadow of John Buchan which hangs over the book: her central character, Hannah Richards, is, after all, an inversion of Buchan’s most famous creation, Richard Hannay, while the plot and location of the novel – a herd of mysterious sheep on an equally mysterious island – is a clear reference to Buchan’s The Island of Sheep. Buchan, of course, is a problematic character these days, with his imperialist views and casual racism and sexism. 

“I can completely understand,” Wishart says, “why people might object to Buchan’s work and they’d be right to do so! He worked for the Ministry of Information and his novels are imbued with an imperial, hierarchical view of the world we’re still in the slow process of dismantling.” 

She goes on to say she tried to re-read The Thirty-Nine Steps a few years ago but couldn’t get beyond the views expressed. All the same, she argues, Buchan “is a hugely influential figure” and it’s hard to argue with that. 

The Knitting Station is Kirsti Wishart’s response, a feminist and lesbian take on that gnarled old standard, the thriller, in which she subverts all the old tropes of the genre with joyous abandon. 

The plot is a mash-up of Ealing Comedy and James Bond, so I’ll leave it to Kirsti to describe it herself, in an interview with the Portobello Book Blog: 

It’s set in the early 1960s and features lesbians, knitting, lots of sheep and some hallucinogenic stovies (what more could you want!). Hannah Richards, a former Bletchley Park code-breaker recovering from a nervous breakdown is sent with a group of patients to the remote island of Tharn, famed for its knitwear, to undergo a form of knitting therapy. She begins to suspect the island is being invaded by Russian agents but can’t be sure if this is a symptom of her condition or a dangerous reality. It’s been described variously as ‘John Buchan on mushrooms’ and ‘Nancy Drew meets One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’ My own description is ‘Scooby Doo on too much Irn Bru’, a daft novel for daft times. 

Well, I don’t know how can you better that, so I won’t try. This is tremendous fun, the lightness of touch and whimsy concealing a very deft authorial touch: Kirsti Wishart is a terrific writer, confident and original, happy to plough her own furrow (if that’s not a poor metaphor for a book about sheep) and write something which truly defies categorisation. 

Great stuff.

The Second Cut by Louise Welsh

In my review of the first Rilke novel, The Cutting Room, I observed how refreshing it was to have a main character who happened to be gay without this having to be, in some way, the point of the story. And I maintain that’s true. However, in her Afterword to the long-awaited sequel, The Second Cut, author Louise Welsh explains: 

I wrote [The Cutting Room] in a white-hot rage, during the Keep the Clause campaign. The campaign objected to the repeal of Section 28… which made it an offence for schools and local authorities to “promote homosexuality”. The clause contributed towards intensifying an already hostile environment for LGBTQ+ people. 

There are twenty years between the writing of these two novels, and that gap is reflected in the narratives’ timeframes, too, with the second novel set in 2022. Welsh notes that things have changed for the better in the intervening period: people can be open about their sexuality and gays on TV are no longer only there to provide the laughs. Section 28 is history and, indeed, many schools now happily debate LGBTQ+ issues. In The Second Cut we see progress, too. It begins with Rilke attending a gay wedding and while, before, he could be arrested for a late night assignation, it can now be arranged through Grindr, no fuss, little danger. 

That’s not to say we’re living in a rainbow paradise, however, in either Welsh’s Glasgow or Rilke’s. In the novel we have a clash in George Square over trans rights after a TERF is engaged to speak at the City Chambers. A van full of police officers is on scene and you suspect violence is likely. Informed debate goes out the window. Prejudices remain. Don’t set aside your rage just yet. 

And, although the Glasgow of The Second Cut is, in some respects, more enlightened than that of The Cutting Room, it is still a noir hinterland, peopled by (mostly) men with no scruples and a penchant for violence. The gothic menace that fuelled The Cutting Room remains, the idea that Rilke, very much an individualist with a healthy contempt for convention, is skating once more too close to danger. For all he can at times make himself unlikeable, you can’t help liking Rilke, and you wish he’d be a bit kinder to himself sometimes. But that would never do. Rilke isn’t going to soften any time soon. 

In his second run-out, he is given a tip from friend JoJo about a house clearance in Galloway that could be lucrative and Rilke decides to take it on. Before he can, though, JoJo is dead, found on the streets of Glasgow and presumed to be a junkie dead of either an overdose or hypothermia. Both are common, neither provoke much interest from the authorities. But Rilke is suspicious. And a suspicious Rilke is incapable of keeping his nose out. 

So begins a story which grows ever darker, taking in people smuggling, orgies, drug manufacture, organised crime. Rilke’s sense of honour forces him to do what he knows is reckless, and with every move he comes closer and closer to danger. 

As you would expect, the story rattles along at a satisfying pace as we approach an inevitable denouement. It doesn’t disappoint. 

Rilke remains one of the best creations in contemporary crime fiction, a man who is complex and uncompromising, utterly real. It’s a joy to make his acquaintance again, and I hope it’s not another twenty years before he’s back. 

The Pharmacist by Rachelle Atalla

I remember when I read 1984, and talked about it to people afterwards, being surprised when they declared it was science-fiction. I’d already read quite a bit of Orwell at that time – I was obsessed with Down and Out in Paris and London – and Orwell was very obviously a social realist, so I read 1984 in that vein. It genuinely didn’t dawn on me that it was, clearly, science-fiction. 

Much the same thing happened when I read Rachelle Atalla’s The Pharmacist and then read some online reviews, which talked of it as speculative fiction. Well, of course it is. It’s a dystopian novel set in a future society following a nuclear devastation, with the last few humans living out a tedious, seemingly pointless existence in a nuclear bunker. If that’s not speculative fiction, what is? And yet, like 1984, I read it as a straight narrative. That’s a testament to the skill of the novelist Rachelle Atalla. She has created a world that is alien but immediately and entirely believable. Virtually every review I’ve read of The Pharmacist uses the word “claustrophobic” and it is certainly the case that Atalla has created a work that immerses the reader in its very restricted environment. 

The bunker is populated by the few survivors of some unexplained nuclear catastrophe. These are presumably people of worth or value, men and women with particular skills or attributes considered useful, no doubt taken from the upper strata of the previous society. We are told that anyone outside this and any other nuclear bunkers will be dead, including close family of many of the bunker’s residents. 

This is no idyll the survivors have arrived at, however. They sleep in huge dormitories in bunk beds four high, subsisting on pouches of puréed food and wearing uncomfortable boiler suits. At one point a wall descends, splitting the bunker in two, arbitrarily separating families. No one knows why. Rumours abound, but no one makes any serious attempt to find out. This, then, is a wholly passive society, institutionalised and acquiescent. 

The story is told by Wolfe (her first name is Alison, but first names are little used in the bunker as they are “considered a cast-off from a life that no longer existed”). Wolfe is the eponymous pharmacist who dispenses drugs to the residents, all of whom appear to be on some form of medicine. Her dull existence is shaken, firstly by the arrival of a young woman, Levitt, as her assistant, and secondly by becoming caught up in the circle of ND, the populist Leader of the bunker society. Like all populists – think Trump, Clown Johnson, Viktor Orbán – he cares not a jot for the populace who have afforded him his privileged position. Corruption rules. This is a brutal society where ND’s word is enforced by organised violence, and Wolfe is drawn into a world of lies and deception, setting in motion a chilling and all too credible series of events. 

What makes the world of The Pharmacist so real is the way Atalla weaves together the micro and the macro. The claustrophobia reviewers have highlighted comes from the detail that Atalla lays over the narrative, the recording of minutiae, the way the most trivial detail gains – because of the tedium of the bunker people’s existence – a heightened sense of importance. 

But alongside this, the human element of the story, is the macro, or political level. And this is the core of the novel: what is society? How does it operate? How is it corrupted and how complicit are we – every single one of us – in that corruption? It seems particularly apposite to be discussing these questions at this juncture in Britain’s story: daily we are witnessing our own society rotting from the head down, our political class comprising the corrupt and the complacent, our media craven and complicit and the general population seemingly content to allow our ethics and sense of decency to wither and die. What happens in The Pharmacist is what is happening to us today. Give us a few years and that bunker will be our reality. 

Kirstin Innes, reviewing the novel in the Press and Journal, noted that Atalla revealed Donald Trump and Boris Johnson had both informed the development of the character of ND. It is the cult of personality that such populists create which is so dangerous and Atalla explores this in a compelling and chilling way. The insidiousness of these tyrants’ assaults on decent society is deeply troubling. This is how the law is transformed into a plaything, there to do the bidding of the leader. Don’t like an election result? Change it. In danger of falling foul of the ministerial code? Dilute the code. Don’t like the look of that young man? Send him to Rwanda. Drip, drip, drip, society is corroded, compromised, sullied. 

I suppose, then, the big fear is that The Pharmacist could be all too prophetic. This is what Wolfe is confronted with and what, ultimately, she fights against. She represents what we all hope we might be, when the time comes, when decisions have to be made, fights fought. She is decency, the love that must prevail. The society that holds. 

The Pharmacist is a novel that works on different levels, a thrilling story which at the same time projects a powerful message about the dangers of corruption. We would do well to heed it.

The Box by Dan Malakin

 

Many moons ago I spent a few days with Dan Malakin on a writing course so I’ve long known him to be an all-round good guy and a damned good writer. Clearly, though, he’s spent the intervening years honing his writing craft because he’s an even better writer now than he was then. That much was clear with his first novel, The Regret, which told the story of Rachel, whose life unravelled at the hands of a computer hacker. Re-reading my review of that novel, one of the things that struck me at the time was how beautifully paced it was. But, I noted: 

The Regret does indeed rattle along at pace, but importantly this is not to the detriment of character or emotion. Where many novels eschew character building in their headlong impulse to thrash the story along, The Regret draws us expertly into the troubled mind of the protagonist Rachel, a woman who has suffered trauma in her life and is now, forcibly, having it revisited on her. 

Well, damn me, that’s precisely the point I was going to make about The Box... 

The story: Ally Truman, a young woman, is being targeted by a right wing incel organisation, Men Together. Her family house is being picketed by organisation members. Her father, Ed, is accused of sexual assault. Her brother is largely estranged from Ed, and Ed fears his family is falling to pieces. 

Then Ally disappears. 

And so is set in motion a narrative that never lets up. Ed is convinced Ally has been abducted but, before he can contact the police, he finds himself the key suspect in a murder, after his DNA is found on a murdered young woman’s body. He flees, teaming up with a friend of Ally and this unlikely pairing go on the run, determined to find out what has happened to Ally. 

What has happened? Why? How? And, most importantly, who do we believe? 

What unfolds is a tightly wound and terrifying tale, leading to a brutal and unexpected denouement. The Box is a masterclass of thriller writing, tense and taut, unpredictable, utterly compelling. 

But. 

Back to my review of The Regret, and my observation that Dan Malakin takes care to draw credible and appealing characters. Dan doesn’t write plot-by-numbers. His characters do not react to events as they must in order to impel the story, but as they would according to their natures. 

What is most impressive about The Box is not the pace and intensity of the narrative, it is the fact that, despite the driving rhythm of the novel, Dan Malakin still manages to draw out some important messages about contemporary society. This is a timely novel, engaging with the eerie world of right wing incels, that shady group of misfits and malcontents for whom misogyny is a way of life and whose increasingly violent, indeed deranged, views on women are growing ever more sinister. Malakin takes us into the heart of that group, confronts head-on this evil intent masquerading as political activism. 

But he never does this in any didactic way and, although we are informed clearly about the nature of these groups, such descriptions never detract from the plot or slow it down or cause any longeurs. Believe me, writing this tight takes a lot of effort. 

The Box is an exhilarating journey, a journey into the darkness of people’s minds and the implacability of hope. This is fiction to savour.

Hex by Jenni Fagan

December 1591, a prison dungeon in Edinburgh and in it a young woman – a child, really, only fifteen – called Geillis Duncan, spending her last hours on Earth before being hanged in the morning as a witch. Into the darkness of this night comes some light, Iris, a visitor, she says, from the future. This is the plot of Jenni Fagan’s luminous novella, Hex, a story about witchcraft and women and the ways of men. We don’t burn witches any longer, but that doesn’t imply we’re any more civilised. Not under the skin. In the margins and in the mainstream women are still under assault and men in power retain their capacity to transgress. 

The story of Geillis Duncan is a terrible one, drawn from a dark aspect of Scottish history, the witch trials of the 1590s. Geillis is accused of witchcraft and tortured. In agony, she confesses and also falsely implicates other women and they, too, are drawn into this nightmare of misogyny and violation. 

Her visitor, Iris – named after the Goddess of the rainbow who delivered messages to the Gods – is a supernatural traveller from 2021, determined Geillis should not be alone on her final night, and as the two women discuss what must happen in the morning we learn the baleful details of Geillis’s experience, the torture, beatings, rape, being forced to lie and in this way bring the same experience down on other innocent women. This is how terror works, degrading innocence, celebrating cruelty, dragging everyone and everything into its maw. 

If this was only a story about Scotland’s legacy of witchcraft it would be bad enough, but Fagan is exploring something much broader here, the roots of that barbarism which have grown and flourished in the dark through five hundred years and still assail our current day experience. Sarah Everard, murdered by a police officer. Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry, sisters stabbed to death in a London park and then dehumanised further when their lifeless bodies were photographed by police officers charged with protecting the scene and the photographs were shared for the gratification of other men too senseless to understand human decency. 

The sisters’ story, and the stories of other women who have suffered at the hands of men, are woven into Fagan’s narrative, wronged women from our age sharing the stage with the wronged women of 1590s Scotland. For the next ten years, twenty, maybe more, we will remember these stories and remember the women’s names, but in time those names will disappear from the narrative and only the stories will remain, the hurt, the degradation, the sheer, unadulterated cruelty of men’s treatment of women. History become myth. And then we shall need a new Jenni Fagan, five hundred years from now, to give these women back their story. 

Iris says at one point: “Men want to know how they got trapped on earth”, but Fagan doesn’t allow them to escape responsibility through this appeal to gnostic suffering. To do so would be to simultaneously acknowledge the spark of the divine in them and it is impossible to reconcile that with what we see men do on a daily basis. “They hold hatred in their heart”, Iris continues. “They want to kill us because we create their lives from our bodies.” But Geillis advises her to show caution: 

I would like to say I have no clue what you are talking about, but I do. I also know what heresy and blasphemy sound like, and if they heard what came out of your mouth they’d hang you before they hang me. 

Women, then, should not talk back. Should not claim agency. Should not question the order of things. Think of the vigil for Sarah Everard, those women who were accosted and arrested for organising a peaceful moment of reflection in a murdered woman’s memory. Patsy Stevenson – because let’s name another name, let’s not forget, not allow her story to become myth – Patsy Stevenson, a slight woman held down and handcuffed by two uniformed thugs for the crime of compassion. 

And now our government, intolerant and hate-filled, stoking fear of “the other”, are changing the laws on freedom of assembly to make it easier for the instruments of the state to turn on the people of the state. Because we can’t have these women gathering and espousing peace, compassion, love, can we? Modern-day witches, all of them, and dangers to the natural order of things. 

Burn them. 

Hex is a historical novel of the present day. A wonderful warning. A troubling tale.