A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin (Orion 2022)

 

'Are you quite sure?’ Bartleby had asked him on more than one occasion.

‘I’ve a life’s worth of mitigation,’ Rebus had assured him.

‘Then not guilty it is,’ Bartleby had agreed.

Doors were being opened to allow access to the Crown’s first witness. Andrew, who had handed police the CCTV from Cafferty’s penthouse, strode in. He wore an expensive suit and sported a new haircut. Dapper and ready for bigger things, he locked eyes with Rebus, and grinned.

May God Forgive by Alan Parks (Canongate Books 2022)

 

Miss Drummond took a sip. ‘Did you know my brother?’ she asked. ‘Before yesterday I mean?’

‘Not well,’ said McCoy ‘But we ran into each other every now and again.’ Wondered if she knew what Ally did for a living.

‘At Paddy’s Market?’ she asked. Then smiled. ‘No need to be discreet, Mr McCoy. I was well aware of what Ally got up to.’ She stirred her tea. ‘I wish you had known him when he was younger. He was different then, vibrant, full of life.'

'What happened?’ asked McCoy before he could stop himself. ‘Sorry to be blunt.’

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Disappointment happened. My brother studied at Glasgow University, English Literature. Was very good at it, even got a first-class honours.’

The shock must have been written on McCoy’s face.

‘Not what you were expecting to hear, I imagine. He was a brilliant young man, Mr McCoy. Everyone had high expectations, thought he would become a lecturer at the university, but he didn’t want to do that. He spent the next two years writing a novel. Put all he had into it. Every publisher told him how brilliant it was but none of them would publish it.’ She smiled again. ‘These were the days before the Lady Chatterley trial. My brother’s book dealt in sexual obsession, pulled no punches. They asked him to amend it, tone it down a bit, but, ever the artist, he refused. Eventually he got it published by Olympia Press in Paris. Do you know them?’

McCoy shook his head.

‘They published the more controversial novels: Alexander Trocchi, Henry Miller, that sort of thing. They also published books with the sexual content but none of the art. Those ones financed the books they thought were of literary value. My brother’s was one of the artistic ones. The Love Chamber it was called.'

Crime (2021)

 

The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin (Canongate 2021)

 

Lighting another cigarette, Laidlaw became aware of a stooped old-timer with rheumy eyes who had joined the bus queue behind him.

‘You should enjoy life more, son. Your face is tripping you.’

The man’s breath was like a blowtorch, and Laidlaw wondered why it was that after a drink so many Glaswegians turned into the Ancient Mariner, eager to share their stories and wisdom with complete strangers. This particular example boasted a rolled-up newspaper, which he wielded like a baton, as if he could conduct the world.

‘At least it’s only my face that’s tripping me,’ Laidlaw responded. ‘Your whole life seems to be one long bout of falling over.’ He gestured towards the rips in the man’s trousers and the elbows of his worn-out jacket.

The man studied him, taking a step back as if to help him focus. ‘You look like an actor, son. Have I seen you in anything?’

‘We’re all actors in this town, haven’t you noticed? You’re acting right now.’

‘Am I?'

'Badly – but even bad acting deserves the occasional round of applause.’ Laidlaw dug a few coins from his pocket and placed them in the man’s hand. ‘Should cover your bus fare. Either that or a paper from this week rather than last.’

There was a double-decker drawing towards them at that moment. Laidlaw gestured for the old man to precede him aboard, but then stood his ground and told the clippie he’d wait for the next one. The new passenger stared in bemusement from the window as the bell rang and the bus pulled away, depriving him of his audience. Laidlaw didn’t doubt he would soon find another.

The April Dead by Alan Parks (Canongate Books 2021)

They turned into Old Shettleston Road, forge on the left, and Shettleston was revealed in all its glory. McCoy didn’t know if it was because of the forge but this bit of Glasgow always seemed dirty, tenements black with smoke and soot. Even the pavements looked grimy. They were firmly in the East End now, not McCoy’s normal stomping ground. Knew it a bit from his beat days. Walking up and down Shettleston Road on a Friday night wasn’t an experience he ever wanted to repeat. Could get wild here. Gangs, pubs on every second corner, gangsters defending their turf. Maybe he was just getting too soft in his old age. This was the Glasgow he started in, should be able to take what it threw at them.

Bobby March Will Live Forever by Alan Parks (Canongate Books 2020)

 

13th July 1973

The door to the Gents opened and the one person McCoy didn’t want to see came out, wiping his hands on a paper towel. Bernie Raeburn in all his portly glory. Raeburn was one of those men that took a bit too much care over what they looked like. Brylcreemed hair, neat moustache, silver tie pin, shoes shined. Probably thought he looked quite the thing. To McCoy, he just looked like what he was: a wide boy. Raeburn dropped the paper towel into a bin by one of the tables and peered over at McCoy. Didn’t look happy to see him. Didn’t look happy at all.

‘What you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Was at a call round the corner. Just came to see if there was anything I could do?’ said McCoy.

‘Did you now?’ said Raeburn, looking amused. ‘Think we’ll manage. Plenty of us boys here already.’

‘Okay.’ McCoy resisted the urge to tell Raeburn exactly where to shove his boys. 

'Any news?’

‘Getting there,’ said Raeburn. ‘Getting there . . .’

He held his finger up. Wait. Took his suit jacket off, smoothed down his pale blue shirt. Decided he was ready to speak.

‘Actually, McCoy, there is something you can do to help. Need you to go back to the shop, tell Billy on the front desk to start calling round. Want anyone who hasn’t already gone on their holidays back in, soon as. Need the manpower for the door-to-doors.’

McCoy nodded, kept his temper. Tried not to look at the row of new telephones on the bar.

'So the sooner the better, eh?’ added Raeburn, looking at the door.

McCoy stood there for a minute, trying to decide what to do. The pub had suddenly gone silent, could even hear the big black flies buzzing against the windows. Knew everyone was watching, waiting to see what would happen. Round twenty-odds in the continuing fight between Raeburn and McCoy. They’d even opened a book back at the shop: how long will it take before one lamps the other? Current best bet was about a week.

February's Son by Alan Parks (Canongate Books 2019)

 

10th February 1973

McCoy stopped for a minute, had to. He put his hands on his knees, bent over, tried to catch his breath. Could feel the sweat running down his back, shirt sticking to him under his jumper and coat. He looked up at the uniform. Another one of Murray’s rugby boys. Size of a house and no doubt thick as shit. Same as all the rest.

‘What floor is this now?’ he asked.

The big bastard wasn’t even breathing heavily, just standing there looking at him, raindrops shining on his woollen uniform.

‘Tenth, sir. Four more to go.’

‘Christ. You’re joking, aren’t you?  I’m half dead already.’

They were making their way up a temporary stairway. Just rope handrails strung between scaffolding poles, stairway itself a series of rough concrete slabs leading up and up to the top of the half-built office block.

‘Ready, sir?’

McCoy nodded reluctantly and they started off again. Maybe he’d be doing better if he hadn’t just finished two cans of Pale Ale and half a joint when the big bastard had come to get him. Him and Susan were laughing, dancing about like loonies, Rolling Stones on the radio, when the knock on the door came. Big shadow of the uniform behind the frosted glass. Panic stations. Susan trying to open the windows and fan the dope smell away with a dishtowel while he kept the uniform talking at the door for as long as he could. Just as well they’d decided against splitting the tab he’d found in his wallet.

Bloody January by Alan Parks (Canongate Books 2017)

 

1st January 1973

McCoy headed along the corridor towards the stairs, heels clicking on the metal walkway, breath clouding out in front of him. Never changed, Barlinnie. Freezing in the winter, boiling in the summer. The old Victorian building was on its last legs. Wasn’t built for the number of prisoners they had stuffed into it now. Three, sometimes four of them locked up in a cell made for two. No wonder the whole prison stank. The smell of overflowing slop buckets and stale sweat was so thick it caught in the back of your throat soon as the big doors opened; stuck to your clothes when you left.

He’d been coming up here since his first weeks on the beat. Only good thing about Barlinnie was that it saved you going anywhere else. The whole spectrum of Glasgow’s wrongdoers ended up in here. From rapists and murderers, nonces and kiddie fiddlers to bewildered old men caught coming out the Co-op with two tins of salmon stuffed up their jumpers and their wives not long in the ground. Barlinnie wasn’t fussy, it took them all in.

He leant over the balcony rail, peered through the netting and the fug of tobacco smoke at the rec hall below. Usual crowd milling about in their denims and white plimsolls. Couple of boys whose names he couldn’t remember playing ping-pong. Low-level troops from the gangs in the Milton gathered round the pool table, all long hair, moustaches and borstal tattoos. One of them pointed with his cue as Jack Thomson was wheeled in front of the TV, started sniggering. A year ago he would have been too scared to even look at someone like Thomson. Now the poor bastard had a dent in his head so deep it was visible from up here. That’s what happens when someone takes a sledgehammer to each knee and then gives you a few whacks on the head for luck. Can’t walk and your brain’s so scrambled you don’t even know where you are.

He buttoned up his trench coat, blew in his hands. Really was fucking freezing in here. A year ago he would have been too scared to even look at someone like Thomson. Now the poor bastard had a dent in his head so deep it was visible from up here. That’s what happens when someone takes a sledgehammer to each knee and then gives you a few whacks on the head for luck. Can’t walk and your brain’s so scrambled you don’t even know where you are.

A Song for the Dark Times by Ian Rankin (Orion 2020)

 

But it wasn’t his need to pee that woke him at 5 a.m. It was a call. He fumbled for both his phone and the bedside lamp, waking Brillo in the process. He couldn’t quite focus on the screen but pressed the phone to his ear anyway.

‘Dad?’ His daughter Samantha’s urgent voice.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked, sitting up, growing more awake by the second.

‘Your landline – it’s been cut off.’

‘I meant to tell you about that … '

'About what?’

‘My landline’s not the reason you’re calling at this hour. Is it Carrie?’

‘She’s fine.’

‘What then? Are you all right?’

‘It’s Keith.’

Her partner; Carrie’s father. Rebus swallowed. ‘What’s happened?’ He listened as Samantha began to sob quietly. Her voice cracked when she spoke.

‘He’s gone.’

‘The bastard … ’

‘Not like that … I don’t think so anyway.’ She sniffed. ‘I mean, I don’t really know. He’s disappeared. It’s been two days.’

‘And things were all right at home?’

‘No worse than usual.’

‘But you don’t think he’s just – I don’t know – maybe gone on a bender somewhere?’

‘He’s not like that.’

‘You’ve reported him missing?’

‘They’re sending someone to talk to me.’

‘They probably told you two days isn’t long?’

‘Yes. But his phone just goes to voicemail.’

‘And he didn’t pack a bag or anything?’

‘No. We’ve got a joint bank account – I looked online and he’s not bought anything or taken money out. His car was left in the lay-by near the church.'

 

In a House of Lies by Ian Rankin (Orion Books 2018)

Sutherland nodded. ‘Not much of an accent left, except when I visit family. I notice you’re English.’

She shook her head. ‘Born here; grew up there – I blame the parents. So where else have you been other than Inverness?’

‘Aberdeen, Glasgow, even Skye for a while.’

‘They have crime on Skye?’

‘I like to think I eradicated it.’ He made a little toast to himself. ‘You ever been anywhere other than Edinburgh?’

‘I was on secondment in Glenrothes when Stuart Bloom disappeared.’

‘That was lucky – if you’d been attached to the case, you couldn’t be on my team now. Conflict of interest, et cetera.

Clarke nodded distractedly. ‘So where do you live these days?’ she eventually asked.

‘Shettleston, in Glasgow.’

‘Can you see Barlinnie from there?’

‘More or less. How about you?’

‘Five minutes from here. Just off Broughton Street.

Conviction by Denise Mina (Harvill Secker 2019)

When we met I was Anna, the new office temp from Somewhere-Outside-of-Aberdeen. I chose Hamish quite carefully. I did love him, I must say that, and I still do, sometimes. But I deliberately picked an older man with money and status. A declamatory man, full of facts and opinions. He was the perfect hide.

Hamish was born in that house and had never lived anywhere else. His family had been on or near the Scottish judiciary for two hundred years. He didn’t much like foreign travel. He read only Scottish writers. That seemed so weird to me. I think I found it a little exotic.

Even Dogs In The Wild by Ian Rankin (Orion Books 2015)

Darryl Christie wasn’t a huge fan of Glasgow. It sprawled in a way his own city didn’t. And there were still traces of the old enmity between Catholic and Protestant – of course that existed in Edinburgh too, but it had never quite defined the place the way it did Glasgow. The people spoke differently here, and had a garrulousness to them that spilled over into physical swagger. They were, as they chanted on the football terraces, ‘the people’. But they were not Darryl Christie’s people. Edinburgh could seem tame by comparison, head always below the parapet, keeping itself to itself. In the independence referendum, Edinburgh had voted No and Glasgow Yes, the latter parading its saltired allegiance around George Square night after night, or else protesting media bias outside the BBC headquarters. The political debate had melted into a blend of carnival and stairheid rammy, so that you never knew if people were joyous or furious.

Darryl Christie had considered all the implications for his various business interests and come to the conclusion that either outcome would probably suit him just fine, so in the end he hadn’t voted at all.

The Good Son by Russel D. McLean (Minotaur Books 2008)

Nearly a week before the night I found myself ready to kill a man in cold blood, I was angling for the security of a job that paid up front.

Which is why I was grateful for the business of any client. Especially the man who huffed his way into the offices of McNee Investigations.

James Robertson stuffed himself into the sixties-style recliner I'd picked up a few weeks earlier at the Salvation Army store on West Marketgait. He was sweating, even though it was a cool day. As if he'd swum across the Tay rather than taking the bridge. The handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of his suit jacket looked damp.

I offered my hand. His was slick and threatened to slip from my grasp. 

It wasn't his size, even if he was a large man. No, the sweat came from agitation. Robertson was tense, his muscles practically humming they were stretched so taut.

Doors Open by Ian Rankin (Orion 2008)

Mike saw it happen. There were two doors next to one another. One of them seemed to be permanently ajar by about an inch, except when someone pushed at its neighbour. As each liveried waiter brought trays of canapés into the salesroom, the effect was the same. One door would swing open, and the other would slowly close. It said a lot about the quality of the paintings, Mike thought, that he was paying more attention to a pair of doors. But he knew he was wrong: it was saying nothing about the actual artworks on display, and everything about him.

Mike Mackenzie was thirty-seven years old, rich and bored. According to the business pages of various newspapers, he remained a “self-made software “mogul’, except that he was no longer a mogul of anything. His company had been sold outright to a venture capital consortium. Rumour had it that he was a burn-out, and maybe he was. He’d started the software business fresh from university with a friend called Gerry Pearson. Gerry had been the real brains of the operation, a genius programmer, but shy with it, so that Mike quickly became the public face of the company. After the sale, they’d split the proceeds fifty-fifty and Gerry then surprised Mike by announcing that he was off to start a new life in Sydney. His emails from Australia extolled the virtues of nightclubs, city life and surfing (and not, for once, the computer kind). He would also send Mike JPEGs and mobile-phone snaps of the ladies he encountered along the way. The quiet, reserved Gerry of old had disappeared, replaced by a rambunctious playboy—which didn’t stop Mike from feeling like a bit of a fraud. He knew that without Gerry, he’d have failed to make the grade in his chosen field.

The Crime Interviews: Volume Two by Len Wanner (Blasted Heath 2012)

Good question. Why are you writing books?

I'm writing books to try and make a connection with a reader. It doesn't matter whether it's a reader who's on the Booker panel or a reader who's a waitress... Whenever I'm up for a prize I think: "Who the fuck are you to judge me?" And then I think: "Give me that fucking prize." Ha! You don't know these people exist until they write to you to say: "You're up for a prize. Do you want to come and have a bad hotel dinner, while feeling really nervous and wearing uncomfortable clothes, and then get up and make a cunt of yourself in front of a big audience?" What the fuck?

I mean, prizes are good marketing tools. They're shorthand for telling readers: "This is a good book." But a better way for people to come to your books is for their pals to say: "You'll like that book. It really meant something to me."

When did a book first really mean something to you?

When I was nineteen, reading Thérèse Raquin in a bedsit, being totally transported by the writing and the way two words can click together, and sitting back, thinking: "What an amazing thing to do with your life – to make that sort of connection with another person, to feel exactly what Zola was talking about, or looking at, or imagining... What an incredible connection!" And what I really love about Zola is that he was a political writer.

Do you see yourself as a political writer?

Yeah! Orwell was who I stole from the library... So it's that connection: reading A Tale of Two Cities and sweating with my heart racing at the end because it was so exciting. But I think you really have to keep your eyes on the prize, because otherwise you become bitter and disillusioned despite having everything. You're being published, you're making a living, you're spending your days in pyjamas wrestling with words, and people are writing to you saying: "I read your book and it mattered to me." How lucky is that?

(Len Wanner interviewing Denise Mina.)

Exit Music by Ian Rankin (Orion Books 2007)

'No one's about to poison me, Rebus. Sergei and me, we see things the same way. Few years from now, Scotland's going to be independent - not a shred of doubt about that. Sitting on thirty years' worth of North Sea oil and God alone knows how much more in the Atlantic. Worst-case scenario, we do a deal with Westminster and end up with eighty or ninety per cent of the cut.' Cafferty gave a slow shrug. 'And then we'll goand spend the money on our usual leisure pursuits - booze, drugs and gambling. Put a supercasino in every city, and watch the profits stack up . . .'
'Another of your silent invasions, eh?'
'Soviets always did think there'd be revolution in Scotland. Won't matter to you, though, will it? You'll be out of the game for good.' Cafferty gave a little wave of the hand and turned his back.