Published by Mantle, 2014.ISBN: 978-1-4472-6437 (hb)
In this noir stand-alone
novel, the setting is Glasgow as with the author’s prize-winning trilogy, but
this time it could be any big city anywhere in Britain where poverty,
hopelessness and drug and alcohol dependency have driven much of the population
into the clutches of loan sharks and their enforcers. Two young men, Alex Glass
and Oliver Peterkinney, are desperate to escape but with no education and no
employment prospects they turn to the only avenue open to them there is and are
taken on by one of the city crime lords, Marty Jones. Their first assignment is
to beat up one of Marty’s enforcers who has been skimming off money that should
have gone to Marty. Despite their rather amateurish approach, they accomplish
the job; their reward is to be asked to one of Marty’s ‘parties’ where the main
feature is girls whose function is to ‘oblige’ the male participants. Alec
falls for one of them, Ella, and she moves into his flat. But for Ollie, still
living with his grandfather Arnie, such relationships are a distraction and
interfere with his main preoccupation which is to establish himself as a major
player in the city’s crime world. So their lives begin to diverge. Glass,
absorbed in his relationship with Ella and full of dreams about their future
life together, goes to a loan shark to finance their lifestyle. But Oliver
plans and schemes to set himself up as an independent enforcers with his own ‘muscle’,
a new boy on a block where the existing crime lords are already vying for
dominance. As Alec’s life spirals downwards, Oliver’s career seems to be
increasingly successful. But what will the existing crime lords, already vying
for dominance, make of Oliver’s arrival on the scene? Will they tolerate or
even use him, or is he, in a world where no-one trusts anyone and alliances are
perpetually shifting, someone to be eliminated? In the end, both lose out to
that violent world.
As with the author’s Glasgow trilogy, his writing skills are clearly
demonstrated. A telling incident showing his skill at characterisation is that
first beating up: Alec goes in with fists flailing but Ollie neatly trips up
the target so that he falls down the stairs and injures himself. None of the
characters, apart from the hapless Alec and Ella and also Oliver’s grandfather,
who despite his own occasional past criminality, really wants his grandson to
make a better life for himself, are
remotely likeable. The author’s prose style, as in the earlier books, is a
unique mixture of dialogue and interior monologue. In this book that is my only
reservation: all the characters (and the story is told from many points of
view) think and talk in the same way. And a list of characters who either
appear or are referred to would have been helpful. Even on a second read, I
wasn’t sure who they all were. Nonetheless, of its type the book it is warmly
recommended.
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Reviewer:
Radmila May
Malcolm
Mackay was born and grew up in Stornoway where he still lives. His debut,
The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter,
marked the beginning of the Glasgow Trilogy, set in the city's underworld and
was longlisted for both the CWA John Creasey Dagger for Best Debut Crime Novel
of the Year and the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller of the Year.
How
a Gunman Says Goodbye is the second of the series.
