Crime Tour of Scotland: Glasgow

A bit late for my August date with the crime tour, but this time it’s Glasgow and Denise Mina.

Being a big fan of Taggart, I dashed to read Denise Mina’s Garnethill when it first came out and eagerly devoured the series – I’m alarmed to see that it is now published as ‘Vintage’. It is gloriously, properly, Tartan noir, with the right touch of macabre humour, and I relished the leading character of Maureen with her multiple troubles - waking with a bad hangover to find your boyfriend in the next room with his throat cut is not a good start to any day.  I also read Sanctum, a standalone, which is one that really gets under the skin – years later, though I’m hazy about the events in the book, I can still feel the atmosphere of it. I have not yet, I must admit, ready any of her Alec Morrow series, but that’s a treat in store! 

Denise Mina is busy on the Tartan Noir crime scene, contributing short stories and other work to collections and collaborations, and she’ll be at Bloody Scotland later this month.

I don’t know whether it’s that early influence of Taggart, or whether it’s because I lived in Edinburgh, but I feel that Glasgow is a better setting for tartan noir than Edinburgh is. I suppose people like the Jekyll & Hyde view of Edinburgh, the posh surface and the dark underbelly, but Glasgow has that black humour, the dry one-liner, that somehow is not quite Edinburgh. It’s not the nasty place it might have been in the 1950s and 1960s – it was an early City of Culture - but there is still a substantial roughness to Glasgow, a defiant self-sufficiency. Glasgow, therefore, sits comfortably in a good number of crime novels, whether it’s only part of the whole as in Peter May’s Lewis books or Libby Patterson’s Hebridean Storm, or a complete background as in Lin Anderson’s excellent Rhona McLeod books. There are also Pat McIntosh’s terrific Gil Cunningham books, set in mediaeval Glasgow – Glasgow houses the third oldest university in Scotland which makes it the fifth oldest in the U.K. It’s a sprawling city with a rich and diverse cultural and industrial heritage. In fact, there is room, I should have said, for a good bit more Glasgow crime on the fiction scene.