Tartan Noir

I’m writing about novels again, this time about a group of splendid Scottish novelists (yes, yes, they all write short stories too) whose work is collectively known as Tartan Noir. Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Denise Mina are the three best known to Americans. I could focus on the women, who include Lin Anderson, Alanna Knight, and Alex Gray, self-titled Femmes Fatales. Anderson and Gray are co-founders of Bloody Scotland, Scotland's leading international crime writing festival. But today I’d like to share my enthusiasm for two terrific male authors: Christopher aka Chris Brookmyre, who’s long been one of my favorites, and Doug Johnstone, whose work I discovered by chance (in fact, while reading the Acknowledgments in Val McDermid’s latest Karen Pirie book) last year.

Both Brookmyre and Johnstone are Scottish to the core. Brookmyre is a satirist and master of humor who’s often been compared to Carl Hiaasen. His earlier novels rant a bit about Scottish politics, which may baffle or bore the American reader, but as his work comes into its full power, he brings ample compassion as well as keen observation to his characters, giving them wit and emotional intelligence, and brilliant plotting to his stories. Johnstone brings to his fiction an eclectic background as a nuclear physicist and rock drummer that adds breadth and depth to the crime and mayhem. Besides dealing with their lives, their relationships, and the extraordinary situations they’re thrust into, his characters reflect on the meaning of the universe and the fragility of human life and planet Earth.

My highest recommendations for Christopher Brookmyre go to the three final novels in the Jack Parlabane series, not counting “Easter eggs” that appear in some of his later books. The Parlabane books really function as standalones, because Jack’s life changes so much from book to book.

Dead Girl Walking Jack’s career as a journalist has just been destroyed by a scandal when he’s asked to find a young rock superstar who’s gone missing. An immersive plunge into the world of sex, drugs, and rock & roll and a nuanced blend of character and mounting suspense.

Black Widow One of the twistiest psychological suspense novels you’ll ever read. Jack investigates the death of the husband of surgeon Diana, who’s been doxed on the Internet in revenge for her blog about sexism in medicine. I defy the most skeptical, after reading Diana’s voice, to say a man can’t write a feminist woman authentically. But is Diana the victim, or is something else going on?

The Last Hack (Want You Gone in UK) Jack teams up with a young hacker whose mother is in prison, leaving her the sole support of a sister with Down's. Hacking, social engineering, twists and turns wrapped up in surprising bonds between unusual people and the empathy that cushions Brookmyre's razor-sharp satire and diamond-hard brilliance.

Doug Johnstone's The Skelfs is so far a six-book series set in Edinburgh about a three-generation family of women who combine two occupations: funerals and private investigation. The first is A Dark Matter. Dorothy, the matriarch, plays drums and nurtures talent in the young. Her daughter Jenny struggles to find herself when a marriage that seemed perfect turns into a relentless fantasmagoria.  

Granddaughter Hannah, a graduate student of astrophysics, ponders the nature of the universe as well as her place in the family. Johnstone is another male writer who can speak in authentic women's voices. He also invites the reader to explore an authentic insider's Edinburgh, dark corners, glorious views, numerous cemeteries, warts and all.

In the course of the series, social, philosophical, and environmental issues get a good airing and a brisk shake along with the family drama and the ins and outs of undertaking. In the latest volume, Living Is A Problem, the Skelfs are getting into eco-friendly burials, and the investigations involve drones, Ukrainians, panpsychism, and a lot more.

What Remains

I’m not always a fan of a dead writer’s unfinished work being ghostwritten by somebody else; in fact, very seldom.

Islands in the Stream, maybe.  And that was only lightly edited, not actually reimagined.  (Pastiche is a different animal: Sherlock Holmes, Jane Austen and vampires.)  That being said, I’m going to immediately contradict myself, and declare for The Dark Remains.

Back story.

  William McIlvanney wrote three Laidlaw books, along with a bunch of other stuff, before his death in 2015.  He left behind notes and a rough draft for a fourth Laidlaw, and Ian Rankin was invited to try his hand.  McIlvanney is widely considered the eminence grise behind Tartan noir, Rankin the most visible brand name, and Rankin has cited McIlvanney as a prime influence. 

You could, I suppose, make a case for

Tartan noir going back to Macbeth, but for our purposes, let’s set the benchmark at Robert Louis Stevenson.  One of the Rebus books is titled Resurrection Men, which conjures up Burke and Hare, of course, but also Stevenson’s meditation on the anatomist murders, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

Stevenson is as much a model for style as material.

  His tone is always reasonable, never hysterical, and the most hair-raising incidents and adventures are served up with a dash of the convincingly commonplace.  Jim Hawkins in the apple barrel.  You hear the echoes in McIlvanney, the flat affect of tone, the undercurrent of violence.  It might remind you, too, of Ted Lewis, a Manchester boy who wrote Jack’s Return Home, the novel Get Carter was based on.  The harmonic below decks is the periphery of despair.

It’s fair to say that if Stevenson wrote romances, then McIlvanney and Rankin are writing

anti-romances.  Laidlaw and Rebus aren’t romantics, in the sense that Chandler’s Marlowe is, nor are they nihilists, like the gang chieftains they so often rub the wrong way.  Not two sides of the same coin.  And not, in other words, a literary convention.  What they bring to the table is something more specific and grave, less of a fashion or a fancy.

This is grounded, as well, in language.

  They lean away from the lyric, not into it.  I don’t mean that their writing is leaden, or pedestrian, far from it, but that it has an earthbound density.  Words have weight.  They’re not to be squandered, but counted out like coin.

Talking about

Glasgow:

“It’s a small town.”
“You could paint it in a day.”

Or:

“Not so much a city as a hangover.”

Why a woman left her husband:

“He bored me to my back teeth.”

And this:

“Ach, he’s somebody’s rearing.” 

“You’re telling me even arseholes have their good side and deserve some sort of justice?”

“The law’s not about justice.  It’s a system we’ve put in place because we can’t have justice.”

This last is the closest you get to any kind of social commentary.

  Curious, because both McIlvanney and Rankin clearly have opinions, but choose to express them through character and circumstance.  A lot of these people, if not in dead-ends, are headed down one-way streets, or locked into a fated embrace.  There’s something more than a little Manichean about it, with choice playing no part. 

Can you tell where McIlvanney leaves off, and Rankin picks up a dropped stitch?

  Nope.  The voice is consistent.  I think that’s a testament to Rankin.  He doesn’t impose.  It’s still McIlvanney’s story, and feels of a piece, breast to back. 

‘Remains,’ in the title, is used as a verb, not a noun.

  It comes up as a line of dialogue, late in the book: darkness is what we’re left with, when all is said and done.  But you could be forgiven for hearing it differently.  I’m sure McIlvanney and Rankin enjoy having it both ways.

A Song for the Dark Times

How come Inspector Rebus gets better and better? Lee Child asks on the dust jacket of A Song for the Dark Times, and the plain fact is that the books have only gone from strength to strength.  Rebus doesn’t get stale, because for thirty-odd years Ian Rankin has never phoned it in.

The trick, if we can call it that, is that Rebus isn’t a static character.  He’s thickened, over time, and fleshed out.  He’s also failed, in significant ways.  The chief dynamic in A Song for the Dark Times is his relationship with his daughter, but more to the point, the damage done.  He’s haunted by the very real possibility that he can never make it right.

Then there’s the atmosphere, the environment.  Rebus isn’t a solitary, although he’d give you an argument.  The people around him are no more generic than he is.  The gangster, Big Ger Cafferty, back for another go; Siobahn Clarke, the dogged junior partner, now DI; and Malcolm Fox, first given space in The Complaints.  The departure, literally, in A Song for the Dark Times, has Rebus taken out of Edinburgh and dropped on the windswept coastline of the far North, in sight of the Orkneys.  Not remotely his turf.

There is, yes, a parallel investigation back home, under the watchful eye of Siobhan Clarke, and there are tempting overlaps and odd confluences – how not? – but the engine of the story is Rebus out of his element.  Displaced in the physical world, and on shaky legs, emotionally.  He’s never been demonstrative, our John, but he’s self-aware, and his melancholy here is a sort of bass note, pitched low, not so much heard as felt, as if to name it would give it power.

The story is very much a suitable tangle, the buried past, an uncertain future, a climate of anxiety our only constant in the present.  Rankin remarks in a note at the end that the book was begun before COVID, but the process carried forward into lockdown.  There’s a sense of those dark energies in the novel, a lingering PTSD, something I doubt we’ll shake anytime soon. I don’t think A Song for the Dark Times is meant as a fable, but it can’t help absorbing the oppressive forces of psychic quarantine and illness.