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| Scottish crime fiction just got a whole lot blacker 28 July 2010 | |
| BACK in the 1990s in the early days of the Scottish crime fiction boom, James Ellroy, the self-styled Demon Dog of American hardboiled literature, coined the phrase "tartan noir" about Ian Rankin. It may have been tongue in cheek, but the name stuck for a wave of Caledonian crime writers who could not seem to stop winning awards and pulling in readers; Rankin, Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Christopher Brookmyre, Paul Johnston and Manda Scott. Since then another new wave has come along which threatens to make some of those tartan noir pioneers look positively sunny. Among them is former Inverness journalist Tony Black. As Orcadian Allan Guthrie (an author who can give Brookmyre a run for his money in the black humour stakes) punningly puts it, "Black is the new noir". Black may not deliver the gory body count of a Val McDermid, but he does make a good job of taking the archetype of the hardbitten and hard-done-by gumshoe hero and setting him down in contemporary Edinburgh. At first though it looks like Black's ex-journalist turned unofficial private eye Gus Dury is on the up after the lows of the first two books in the series. Back with his ex-wife, he is ensconced in domestic bliss of a sort with her and Usual, the failed fighting dog he acquired in the last book, and off the drink, even though he carries a half bottle of booze with him at all times as a test of his strength (a tactic employed by that more established Edinburgh 'tec Inspector Rebus at one point). Then Dury's brother is murdered and his slender chance of happiness thrown away as he looks for revenge, along the way finding corruption and secrets in a capital where an influx of east European labour is even changing the underworld. In truth Dury is neither a terribly good detective, seizing on a theory early on and looking for evidence to support it, nor an entirely likable person, equipped as he is with enough chips on his shoulder to stock a reasonably-sized Harry Ramsden's. But he is a compelling character and his angry energy burns off the page to keep the reader magnetised as we follow him down the mean streets of Auld Reekie. While Black sticks with Scotland, Fife born Craig Russell looks abroad to the German city of Hamburg (at least in this series, as Russell also writes about a private eye in 1950s Glasgow). Russell's policeman hero, Jan Fabel, is a much more immediately likable character than Dury and one with a greater affection for his city than the curmudgeonly former hack who can only see the dark side of Edinburgh. A fundamentally decent man, whose area of expertise is catching serial killers, Fabel has enough women problems in his life with an angry ex-wife who holds him responsible for their daughter wanting to join the police herself, a girlfriend who wants commitment, and a stroppy subordinate. Then, when an English pop star is knifed to death in Hamburg's red light district, it looks as though an uncaught female serial killer has re-surfaced. After a visiting Danish policeman dies, apparently from natural causes, Fabel and a prickly Scandinavian colleague follow a tangled web which takes in a media conglomerate, a murdered gangster, a businessman victim of a suspicious suicide and hints of a top secret East German programme to create the perfect assassin. It may be faintly preposterous, but "The Valkyrie Song" is undeniably readable, as gripping and atmospheric as classic Frederick Forsyth. Certainly worth considering adding to your luggage when you head off on holiday this year. |
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