The Photographer by Craig Robertson

Tags

crime, fiction, Glasgow, Tartan Noir

I have been a Craig Robertson fan since his debut novel Random. His new book, The Photographer, is up to his usual high standard.

A young woman is attacked and raped in her own home. She is badly beaten and when she wakes up after the traumatic event she remembers that each time her attacker punched her, he called her a

The Long Glasgow Kiss by Craig Russell

Tags

crime fiction, Glasgow, historical fiction

I don’t know about you, but when I’m browsing for a new book, the opening paragraph is of vital importance. If the first paragraph grabs me, I’ll buy the book. And when the first line is as good as that in Craig Russell’s The Long Glasgow Kiss, I want to take it home and feed it strawberries and chocolate.

“Some concepts are alien to the Glaswegian mind. Salad. Dentistry. Forgiveness.”

Come on, you know it doesn’t get much better than that.

Our narrator in this tale of missing persons and boxing is Lennox, a Canadian who has settled into the life of a private investigator in post-war Glasgow. And if you think the ‘violent Glasgow’ tag so often used by the media is a modern invention, you’d be wrong. Oh, so very wrong. Russell’s Glasgow is one of petty thugs, gangs based on religious affiliation, crime lords and…more thugs. Never has the label ‘tartan noir’ been so accurate.

In making Lennox Canadian, Russell has loaned his character just enough exoticness to make his smart-mouthed narration believable. This is a man who cares about whether he dons a fedora or a borselino and whether his sap ruins the line of his fine wool summer suit. I think I might love him…

It is also a very, very funny book. I found myself sniggering frequently at such bon mots as,

“They say Eskimos have a hundred words for snow. Glaswegians must have twice that many for the different kind of rain that batters down on the city…”

or

“A Scottish acquaintance had once tried to reassure me that tweed from the Isle of Harris was less scratchy, explaining that this was because it was traditionally soaked in human urine. I could have been accused of being picky, but I preferred couture that hadn’t been pissed on by an inbred crofter.”

I am deliberately not telling you what the book is about. Not a hint of a plotline shall pass these lips. I want you to go buy it and enjoy each twist and turn as it happens on the page. And if you don’t, I’ll set Twinkletoes on you. Trust me – that’s something you and your shoemaker don’t want to happen. Not if you want to keep dancing…

Random by Craig Robertson

Tags

crime, Glasgow, murder, thriller

We have a legal system so that the courts can take responsibility for meting out justice, taking decisions regarding punishment away from those who have been offended against and making that justice impartial instead of fueled  by revenge. But what if those courts let you down?

This is the situation the main character in Random finds himself in. His 11 year old daughter is killed by a drunk driver. The culprit, because of a contact in the press, is portrayed as a pillar of the community and the young girl as a reckless, out-of-control tearaway. When the case reached the courts the drunk driver was let off. What father wouldn’t want to take matters into his own hands and mete out his own form of justice?

And if this was where the book concentrated, the actions of the man who ends up with the nicknames of Jock the Ripper and The Cutter would be understandable. But Robertson takes it much, much further. And I’m not sure how I feel about that.

The book is well written. The prose is punchy and Robertson, a successful journalist, has infused the tale with Weegie confidence. His portrayal of the various characters who populate Random is accurate and believable, the language they use is spot on and the gangsters are exactly as you would imagine a Glasgow gangster to be.

The story is told in the first person so we see events unfold through the eyes of the Cutter, a man who plans his attacks with cold intelligence. His methods of dispatching his victims are varied and gruesome and it was a brave decision to tell the story through the eyes of the killer rather than one of the detectives who is trying to catch him.

But…and this is a big but, I just could not empathise with the character.

It is one thing to want to kill the man who killed your daughter, but the death toll in this book goes way beyond that and the reasoning behind these other killings left a distinctly unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Would I read more by this writer? Definitely. Would I recommend this book? A more difficult question. Every other review I have read of this book is positive and I didn’t see any with the same problem with it that I did. I would probably say yes, if only to encourage you to read someone I am sure will become a big name in the crime fiction field.