Scottish Book Week

I'm very excited to be speaking with fellow Ringwood Publishing authors, Simon McLean and Tom Wood at a Scottish Book Trust Book Week Scotland event on 16 November. We will be discussing the future of policing.

My forthcoming novel, Cuddies Strip, although set in 1935, has much we can learn from today.

Tom Wood is an ex-Deputy Chief Constable (Lothian and Borders) and has written a superb account of the Ruxton Murders, dubbed the first modern murder case.

Simon McLean is a former detective and the author of the forthcoming The Ten Percent.

Pre-order a signed copy of my new novel

My new novel, Cuddies Strip, will be published by Ringwood Press later this year.

You can pre-order a signed copy and have guaranteed delivery by publication date.

I am available for any blog spots or interviews. Just leave a message here and I'll get back to you.

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimar McBride

 

In a fairly short space of time, I have read Eimar McBride’s first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends. Consequently, I had the queasiest feeling of familiarity as I read The Lesser Bohemians. All feature Irish protagonists, of course, while in The Lesser Bohemians there’s the stream-of-consciousness writing style of A Girl, and the obsessively detailed analysis of a relationship between a young woman and a much older man from Conversations. I think I need something completely different next.

The Lesser Bohemians is an odd novel. Sometimes brilliant, it nonetheless never quite pulls me in the way the superb A Girl is a Half-formed Thing did. That novel was simply breathtaking, and I felt deeply about the main character in a way I never did in The Lesser Bohemians. I’m not sure why. The main characters, Eily and Stephen, are superbly realised, real, three-dimensional human beings with massive flaws and fragile hopes and a need to connect they cannot themselves quite recognise or reconcile. But... But...

Basically, there is something structurally strange in the novel. Written in the first person, from Eily’s perspective, the scenes where she recounts her horrible and confusing coming of age and maturation are superbly written, but there are two extremely lengthy passage where we are taken out of her immediate consciousness. In the first, lasting some seventy pages – which is far, far too long – Stephen relates to her the bizarre and traumatic nature of his childhood. It is certainly powerful, and clearly explains how Stephen came to be such a troubled and troubling individual, but as a result of Eily relating his words, the novel loses the immediacy, the urgency of those passages where Eily is telling her own story her own way. And the second passage, near the end, is even more distancing. In it, Eily tells us of the conversation Stephen had with her, in which he is relating the conversation his ex-wife had with him, in which she relates further conversations with different people. It’s almost Shakespearian in its nested histories, and it makes for unsatisfying reading. I had to constantly remind myself who was speaking to whom.

This is especially problematic because it is the culmination of the novel, and it is the climax of their relationship, and yet it is told in this – let’s be honest – clumsy way. McBride is clearly a remarkably talented writer, so I am certain this is not just bad writing. She must have intended it to be written this way, and she must have her reasons for doing so. I am not sure what they are.

McBride has developed a unique voice. She is most commonly compared to compatriot James Joyce, although there is something of Jose Saramago about her style, or Malcolm Lowry, perhaps, in the almost hallucinatory way she can describe things. William Golding, in his Pincher Martin mode, would have found her writing intoxicating (although intoxication was perhaps something Golding was too familiar with). This beautifully fragmented style was so perfectly matched to the story in A Girl, I think many readers of Bohemians would have approached the follow-up novel with trepidation. McBride herself wrote of her style transferring into the new novel:

I was always a little surprised by the opinion that the style couldn’t work in other contexts. It seemed perfectly adaptable to me and that whatever uniqueness it possessed related to its symbiosis with the subject matter.

I don’t know. I think it was a legitimate fear. In A Girl, the narrator was the voice and the voice was the narrator. As a reader you got this extraordinary sense that you were in her head, looking through her eyes, understanding with her brain. Could the almost visceral immediacyh of that be transplanted into another character?

Yes, I think it can, and it does. I did worry that the stream-of-consciousness would sound false second time around but it doesn’t. McBride is a master of her style and it works absolutely. By eschewing grammar and riding roughshod over language, inventing, eliding, toying, she has an uncanny ability to evoke senses through the merest fragments of language. “The anger though,” she writes at one point, after having had sex with Stephen. Three words. A mountain of meaning.

Eimar McBride is clearly a wonderful writer. Her next novel, she says, is going to be “smaller and quieter”. Well, perhaps, but I suspect it is still going to make us think and wonder and worry. And what could be better than that?

Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth

Normally, I’m not a fan of invented places in fiction. I much prefer the Stuart MacBride approach of setting novels in recognisable locations, rather than making them up (in MacBride’s case it helps that I lived in Aberdeen for three years so am very familiar with his locations. Cathi Unsworth’s Weirdo, however, has such an extraordinary sense of place it doesn’t matter that her Norfolk seaside town of Ernemouth is not a real place because Cathi describes it so vividly it comes to life.

What she also does in this novel is get inside the heads of troubled teenagers and see the world – big, unfriendly, aggressive – from their solipsistic point of view. It’s quite a feat, describing the fractured views of genuinely confused young people with such acuity that you believe, entirely, in them and their several crises. Make no mistake, Weirdo is an excellent book.

The drama alternates betwen 1984, when a young boy was horrifically – possibly satanically – murdered in an old pillbox on the Norfolk coastline, and 2003, when Sean Ward, a private detective is reinvestigating the case after new DNA evidence comes to light casting doubt on the verdict in the original court case. In that, Corinne Woodrow, a damaged 15-year-old girl, was alone convicted of the murder but this new evidence suggests there may have been someone else present when the crime was committed. We see the gradual unfurling of the original crime, the coming together of a group of disconnected and disaffected young people, their orbits colliding catastrophically until disaster becomes inevitable; and, simultaneously, we follow Sean as he and a friendly local journalist try to unpick those same events from across the divide of two decades of silence and cover-up. As with most of Cathi Unsworth’s novels, there is a large and rich cast of characters, and each possesses their own foibles and concerns. It quickly becomes apparent that all is not as it seems and that Corinne Woodrow may be an innocent wronged.

There is a crime here, and a mystery to be resolved (and very effectively it is, too), but in some regards Weirdo isn’t a crime novel. I’m not sure any of Cathi’s books are. She’s on record as saying: “It is not the investigators, but the victims of crime to whom I want to give the main voices in my novels.” And that is the key to her writing. This is not a solve-it-by-numbers kind of novel, where things happen because they have to in order to develop the plot. Cathi Unsworth creates believable characters and you can tell she cares about them and, in so doing, she makes us care about them. Corinne is a fragile soul, and there is an inevitability about the way she is damaged, over and again, by a cold and calculating universe.

Thus, we are taken deep into the world of these teenage misfits, much more densely than we would had the novel been written by someone else, because for Cathi it’s character that matters, not plot. Sure, the central action is shocking and you want to have the solution revealed, but the novel explores the danse macabre of these various young participants, seeing in each of them the failures and triumphs, fears, humiliations, anger and love, hope and despair that helped shape them as human beings, helped each one to play their part in the tragedy that unfolded. It’s beautifully done.

The Mobster's Lament by Ray Celestin

 

 

The Axeman’s Jazz, the first in Ray Celestin’s City Blues Quartet, won the CWA New Blood Dagger for best debut crime novel and it was a well deserved accolade. It was exciting, original, densely evocative of a fascinating time and place, suffused with the rhythms of rudimentary 1910s jazz when Louis Armstrong – a character in the book – took his first steps towards immortality. The second in the quartet, Dead Man’s Blues, picked up the same central characters a decade on, in 1920s Chicago, the era of Al Capone, the moment when, with the magnificent West End Blues, Satchmo changed jazz forever.

Now, the third in the series, The Mobster’s Lament, jumps forward to the 1940s in New York, when Charlie Bird Parker and Dizzy Gillespier were inventing bebop and jazz was preparing for its next, stunning metamorphosis.

The central pairing of Ida Davis, a private detective and a black woman who could pass for white – often, alas, a distinct advantage in those days – and Michael Talbot, a former New Orleans police chief, remain. They are older, of course, and Michael, in particular is not the man he was. Retired and his body ageing, he is no longer suited to the hectic, violent world still inhabited by Ida. Unfortunately, though, he is hurled back into it when his son is arrested and charged with four brutal – possibly voodoo-related – murders in a seedy flophouse. Michael knows he is innocent but the case against him seems watertight.

Curiously watertight.

He calls on Ida, his old friend and colleague, to assist, and they begin an investigation which takes them into the heart of 1940s gangsterdom, with passing visits to the jazz bars in which Bird and Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis were beginning their experiments with the very structure of music.

A parallel plot features a Mafia fixer, Gabriel Leveson, who has a secret of his own – he has been salting away Mob money for years and has planned his imminent escape. Before he can put the plan into action, however, he too is drawn into a dangerous game of cat and mouse when he is ordered by a Mafia boss to track down a missing $1 million. Gradually, violently, the stories of Ida and Michael and Gabriel converge.

As always with Ray Celestin, there is a mindboggling amount of plot. You would do well to read this fast, as you will lose track of characters and events otherwise. And the other signature traits of Celestin are also present – the vivid historical detail, the periodic, very violent crime, the beautiful overlaying of the history of jazz, here told through Satchmo in his wilderness years and through the tyros setting the bebop clubs on fire.

It is perhaps fifty or sixty pages too long. There are some longeurs and repetitions and sometimes the detail becomes almost photographic, but this is a failing so many writers succumb to as their careers progress. Take virtually any writer and track the average page count from first novel to last and you see the same thing. Oh, for an editor who could take writers in hand and tell them to cut the verbiage.

But, for all that, this is a great read. Fast-paced, exciting, very well written and with characters who feel alive and vibrant, with all their failings and foibles, their strengths and their fears. Once you start, you’re unlikely to finish until the final page is turned.

The fourth and final novel is due to be set in Los Angeles in 1967. The sixties was the era when bebop was being overtaken by free jazz, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Pharoah Sanders et al. That’s my favourite jazz period and I can’t wait to read it.