The Crime of it All

As a Scottish crime writer abroad, what do you make of the difference between UK and US crime fiction?

One difference is that we don’t really have a great history of crime fiction – and we don’t have a Chandler or a Hammett, or a figure approaching their stature. I omit the English writers such as Christie and Sayers: they completely lacked the raw edge of Chandler, Hammett and James M Cain. They just felt so upper class, so privileged. And so amateur. American cops and criminals wouldn’t be seen dead eating scones with clotted cream.

Another difference, I suppose, is that we occupy a tiny space geographically, and so we’re quite limited in Scotland by the scope of terrain. Chandler and Hammett, and in more recent years the robustly sprawling James Ellroy, had all the shiny frenzy of California to explore – including the often murderous dark events lying under the fabulous gloss of the motion picture industry. Everybody wanted to read about California, the wealth, the sexual practices of the famous whose faces flitted across screens, and their other nefarious doings. What did we have – shipbuilding? Jam-making? Tourism? With no disrespect, I can’t imagine the life of a Clydeside rivetter providing plot materials for an American reading audience. On second thoughts, I can. But there would be translation problems from Glesca-speak.

I ought to qualify this by saying the physical size of a place shouldn’t matter much – scores of crime novels have been set to great advantage in limited spaces. The country house murder, for one, has often been a staple of the English crime writer, if not his Scottish counterpart.

It always felt to me that the American crime writers were less restricted, they weren’t hampered, they were bold, alive in a big country filled with big ideas and big money and big crimes and adopted a prose style that reflected their society. It’s no fault of Scots crime writers that their boundaries are smaller, their crimes less delicious. And another point of difference – Americans cops and private eyes and criminals carried guns. The writers had given their central characters the means of killing. Guns were relatively exotic in Scotland, as indeed were private eyes.

Here I might add a patriotic aside and get in a nod to my favourite Scottish writer. In the opening of Treasure Island, Stevenson used the noir mood – which came to flavour a whole body of American crime novels: Remember The Black Spot, the fog, the sheer sense of dread that gives heft to the opening sequence? In this case, at least, we had a Scottish novelist writing – if only in passing – in a tone that would later be the entire undertow of so many American crime novels.

By the time I returned to Scotland, after spending twenty years in the USA, I’d read my way through Cornell Woolrich, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Bourke, Thomas Cook, Thomas Perry, and others, including the woefully underestimated Ross Thomas, who was re-defining ‘cool’ in his own understated way, but didn’t command anything like the readership of Leonard and Bourke. It really wasn’t until I came back to Glasgow in 1990 that I even heard there was a genre of Scottish crime fiction being touted as ‘Tartan Noir’.

What do you make of Tartan Noir from the geographical and critical distance of having lived, written, and taught creative writing in the States?

Tartan Noir seems such a blanket term covering everyone whose crime books are set in Scotland. I think it’s just another daft marketing ploy, to be honest. Book salesmen love categories. In the old days, editors picked and edited books. Alas, the sales forces have pretty much taken over, and they adore ‘slots’ on shelves. Here we can stick ‘tartan noir’ or over here was can stack ‘teenage chic-lit’. It’s a mindset that diminishes, indeed almost negates, the purpose of editors. I know more than a few editors who feel disemboweled by the power of sales forces.

Tartan Noir, though – it’s so elastic. It seems to me there are too many disparate voices at work in the crime field in Scotland for such a facile label. Kate Atkinson, a clever writer, has written ‘crime’ novels that are light years removed from, say, the gritty action-filled work of Stuart MacBride. How can both be made to fit under one label when they might as well be writing in different genres?

The first specific ‘Scottish’ crime novels I remember were those of William McIlvanney – the Laidlaw books, of which I seem to recall there were only three – who brought a finesse to his work that you don’t find in too many crime writers. McIlvanney had a rising literary reputation, and the fact he turned to crime at all was a big surprise. I didn’t regard this as a step down, just an unexpected change of direction. He might inadvertently have been the father of ‘tartan noir’, although I don’t imagine for a moment it’s anything he’d want to claim. I still think his early forays into crime surpass most of what has come after.

As an aside: I wonder if the recent upsurge of Scandinavian crime fiction will test the salesmen to invent a new slot just for that. Norwegian Noir? Swedish Gloom?

You were writing crime fiction before Ian Rankin made it a Scottish pastime. What brought you to the genre and how have you experienced this literary Renaissance?

The best answer I can think of is that it gave me license to write about Glasgow, where I was brought up and went to school. I’d always wanted to do this – but couldn’t quite find the form I needed. I had published one novel, Agents of Darkness, set in Los Angeles and Manila, that just happened to have a Glaswegian cop at the heart of it, but he was well out of his depths in the maze of CIA misadventures in Marcos’s domain. Although, I did manage to get in some of the cop’s Glasgow memories.

When I’d come back to Scotland after 20 years of American exile I decided I had to write at least one crime novel set entirely in Glasgow, peopled almost entirely with Glaswegians.

So I tried to tap into the riches of the city’s character – and hopefully some of its extraordinary rough wit – and came up with The Bad Fire, and a Jewish cop at the heart of it. Where this character sprang from, who can say?  I don’t even recall how he came to be named Lou Perlman, a Jew who lives in an area still marked on some old Glasgow maps as Egypt. Perlman is obstinate. He doesn’t want to be Giffnockized. He didn’t even exist in my head when I started to write the book. So when he burst into the storyline I was surprised by his abrupt entrance. This sudden birthing isn’t such a bad experience for a writer – the plan of the book, such as it was, unraveled, and had to be altered to accommodate the rambunctious Perlman.

Three other Perlmans followed, and after that I couldn’t face the notion of writing about Glasgow again. Maybe one day, who knows? I admire the fidelity of writers who can stick with one central character – but there’s a point, I believe, where the character has, at least for the time being, reached the limits of his growth, and the writer may want to discover other muscles to flex.

Talking about personal growth, you taught creative writing at universities in the US and liked it so much you became a writer just to escape the campus. Have you looked back since?

Teaching creative writing is draining and a little embarrassing. Some classes might have been better labeled as Remedial English. Or Basic Grammar. I don’t believe you can teach people to write fiction just because he/she ‘fancies’ being a writer. You either suffer from a need to write, or you don’t. I’m not condemning all the students I had – there were always a few with promise. And some who published eventually. But I dislike the idea of ‘schools’ of fiction that emerged from universities – like the University of Iowa, or East Anglia in the UK, for example. I sometimes get the feeling that, years after graduating, some of its alumni are writing to please their fellow students. Because that is the public they know best.

Did I look back? I had a certain amount of good fortune before I left America when I wrote a couple of thrillers that did pretty well commercially. So, in that sense, I haven’t looked back. It’s always a disappointment when a book doesn’t do as well as you hoped for, but that’s writing for you: a habit as hard to break as smoking.

So what is it you enjoy about writing crime novels?

It’s easier to say what I don’t like. I don’t like the plod of procedure. The endless Q and A. I don’t like the forensics you often need to do, even if you barely understand them. Though I need to say that the forensics people who’ve helped me are usually funny, with a very black sense of humour.

I don’t like the grind of plotting, because you’re often left wondering if you’ve made a good base for a twist in the tale, or a big revelation. If you haven’t, well, you need to go back and tamper a little. Or a lot. I don’t like the feeling that you don’t have all the time you need to explore the consciousness of character – because that slows the pace, and crime fiction is supposed to have pace and movement. I don’t like to feel I’m pitting my wits against the reader by trying to come up with a requisite plot shock out of nowhere.

Ah, but I do like very dark atmosphere. I also like whacked-out characters, loonies, people on the edge, manic depressives, smalltime crooks, hard-done-by victims, and outright sociopaths, and there are plenty of those in Glasgow. I’m fond of drunks and eccentrics and men whose criminal ambitions far outweigh their intelligence.

What I like best of all is trying to set a mood that suggests dread, and secrets withheld. And coming across a character, like Perlman, who I wished was real. A guy I could walk down Sauchiehall Street with. He felt very real to me anyway. That was the best feeling I bring away from the Glasgow books.

After twenty years in the US you decided to move to the Irish country side. Did you notice your literary voice change along with your demotic environment?

After a while in Ireland, where I wrote the Glasgow novels, I started to find myself thinking in Glasgow rhythms, trying to recollect as much as I could of Glasgow verbal peculiarities, of which there are many. But I couldn’t quite get what I wanted until I started to go back to Glasgow regularly. And started to listen to how much had changed – and how much hadn’t. But I wasn’t prepared for a peculiar development of the spoken word, especially among young people – it had become more nasal, more of a ‘honk’ than it had been when I was growing up. Very hard to recreate this kind of tonal change on the page. But at least I could hear it in my mind.

So, yes, my voice changed a little in the effort to reflect Glasgow. But it helped me that I had unconsciously stored away my original Govan accent in some chamber of remembered childhood – my everyday accent now is hard to place…

How important is this cultural context for you and your work?

Not sure how to answer this. I feel I left Glasgow when I’d written the fourth crime novel. I go back from time to time and wonder if I’ll catch the whiff of a fifth book. It hasn’t happened yet. It may never.

One drawback to my present country of choice is that I can’t find a way into the Irish experience, perhaps because I wasn’t brought up here. I would no more attempt an Irish novel than I would an Icelandic one. But if I had a Glasgow novel leap out at me I wouldn’t hesitate about writing it.

At this stage you have written in three countries and cultures that have had their historical struggles with defining themselves as “not English”. Coincidence?

Probably. At some level anyway. I wasn’t brought up to love the English. Our history schoolbooks were always slanted against the English and their colonial sins. I have never felt at home in England, though. I take that back – I enjoyed the few years I spent as a book editor, because Soho was brilliant in the very late 60s and early 70s. And drink was the glue of the book industry.

I was brainwashed in Scotland early on. And I can’t understand why there are so many Scotsmen in government from London. And I don’t get the monarchic concept at all. And the class system, which a lot of the English like to pretend has faded away, makes me queasy.

In hindsight then, have these formerly British cultures played into your sensibility for a literature that deals in fear, violence, and correction?

If they have it’s down at a level where I’m not absolutely aware of it. I was sort of conscious, growing up, that we were held in disdain by a lot of the English. Northern Scruff. It was always a great uplifting moment, though rare, when we beat them at any sport.

Having said that, the crime fiction that I read was generally English – I remember Nancy Spain – where was that memory stashed? – who wrote a crime novel called Poison in Play. I think it had a tennis background. That was the first crime novel I read. Then there were the Graham Green ‘entertainments’ as he called them, as if he were half-ashamed that he was writing to be read. But Brighton Rock and The Third Man and some of the others are still terrific atmospheric crime novels. Then there was Fleming – I couldn’t read any of the Bonds. I had a few good moments with Dorothy L Sayers, despite the reek of upper class breeding in the background. There were always English crime books by the barrow load, titles I’ve forgotten, where butlers butled and scullery maids muttered in the kitchen. And the cook bossed everyone around.

On TV crime meant Dixon of Dock Green. No ASBOS back then, no perves, no real evil bastards, at least not on the box  –  just guys who’d gone off the tracks and got a quiet talking to with the wise copper, and off they went sadder but better people.

Sadder but better – you moved to Ireland before the country’s recent economic farce. From the point of view of Glasgow’s prodigal son you have written about the “mutton pie culture” and in The Bad Fire you comment on Scotland as a changing nation. How has the city changed since your youth? And how have you explored this new generation of gentrification in your writing?

That’s very interesting. I walk around the ‘new’ Glasgow, and I still feel a shadow of an older Glasgow all about me. It’s a city of men walking to the shipyards in boots that clacked hard on the pavements even as the sun had yet to rise. It’s tenements with outside toilets. And relics of bomb-shelters built to repel German air strikes – they were so flimsy they couldn’t have withstood a firework – and yet they remained for years after WW2 before somebody thought to demolish them. Tramps slept in them. They became unofficial doss houses or public toilets or where drunks slept off their binges. I can recall the communal backyard wash-houses, the ‘steamies’ where women scrubbed the family laundry… so every step I take into this new Glasgow somehow still has a sniff of the old.

And I think that the ‘gentrification’ conceals all these old forgotten dark dank places, that under recent prosperity – before that moron Blair and his unfunny sidekick Brown collapsed the economy… let’s not go in this direction, though – when it was nominated European City of Culture, I felt a kind of pride in the place, and yet what lurked beneath hadn’t changed.

You could walk from the Kelvinside Art Gallery to some of the worst slums in Europe. You could go to a football match and encounter some of the most toxic sectarianism anywhere. You could see the despair that hung like a pall on the high-rise towers of ill-conceived housing schemes where people lived lives of hopelessness or loneliness or state-assisted drug addiction – even if you could just pop into the Art Gallery and admire the art, or if you had the readies you could eat oysters and drink champagne at Rogano’s, I was still haunted by the other Glasgow.

So some of the city was tarted up. Much of it was renovated. Striking old Victorian sandstone buildings were lovingly repaired. And yet, I was always lost in a fog of memories that contradicted how the city was said to have changed. And not just memories alone – on one of my visits to Glasgow I was mugged by a young guy who followed me down an empty city-centre street at night singing in an eerie tuneless way: I am a Glasgow Boy, I’m gonny kill you. It was scary. He kept singing the same tuneless words, like he was a member of a murderous cult. Fortunately, when he finally caught up with me and I turned to look at him, and he grappled with me, my wife, small but bold, landed a solid punch on his face that stopped him a moment. He was about to come at me again – but by then a passing taxi driver who was outraged by this attempted assault on the streets of his city, had fetched the polis, who dragged the kid off… I had the unsettling feeling that a knife was somewhere in the kid’s clothing, and that if it hadn’t been for the cabbie’s enormous sense of civic duty or the prompt appearance of the police, the situation could have turned out differently. And bloody.

But it made me wonder how much had really changed here. The city has always had a violent core. Before I was born, it was the city of the Open Razor. It has always had alcohol-fuelled violence. And non-alcoholic too. It has its territorial warfare zones. It has always had its gangsters, some of them gallus and openly defiant of law. In certain bars, you feel you are under scrutiny as a candidate for a head-butt just by your mere presence in somebody else’s location.

So gentrification, if that’s the word, feels superficial to me in many ways. Museums, restored sandstone tenements, new bridges, motorways, big hotels, flash restaurants, I don’t think all this adds up to real change, the kind that needs to take place inside people, and in the hearts of their politicians – assuming, with sad naivety, that they are blessed with this organ.

Has writing about the contrast between Glasgow’s dark side and the country’s traditional respect for learning, social values, and community spirit helped you understand the city better yourself?

No. I wish I could say yes. I still love Glasgow. I can’t forget that. I love walking around the place. But which Glasgow is it? The new one, the old, or the one where I often feel a sense of imminent menace? I don’t know. Perhaps that’s the big mystery to solve.

Speaking of mysteries, can Scotland’s high degree of social mobility account for the fact that the country produces more crime writers than rain?

I like your question. Do you think there are too many crime writers aboard the Tartan Noir Express? I don’t keep in touch enough to have an answer. I wouldn’t read a crime novel just because it’s Scottish. There are some seriously depressing ones coming out of Scandinavia these days that interest me. I feel a tectonic shift inside me that is directing me, the older I get, into other areas of fiction writing. So I may not write another crime novel. Or if I did, I might set it elsewhere. Liberate myself from my history. And how the city of my birth remains at heart is a big mystery to me. One I will never solve. And couldn’t anyway.

Ian Rankin has referred to crime writers as the smokers at the party. Are you comfortable in that club?

It’s a strange remark to make. A novel is a novel. It has a story and people in the story and they do certain things and don’t do certain other things. It seems so simple when you boil it down to that. Whether it’s crime, science fiction, mainstream, whether in first person, second, third, whether epistolary or written in diary form, or verse, they all have roughly the same bone structure.

I don’t feel I belong in a club. I feel quite removed from clubland. But then again, I live in the Bog. So I don’t even know where this club is. For some reason, I am not very comfortable in the presence of writers. I can’t explain that.

Assuming it’s a generational thing, what are the significant differences you notice when you read the work of Allan Guthrie, Ray Banks, Denise Mina and the many other young Scottish crime writers?

I like the work of Allan Guthrie and Denise Mina. They have authenticity. Ray Banks I only know from a reading at the Edinburgh Bookfest. I never forget his comment to me after the reading. “It’s amazing to meet somebody who was writing before I was born.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by amazing, or if it was just something to say, but the remark has always stuck in my mind. I don’t notice any significant differences to be honest with you.

Since your return from oversees you have had some remarkable success with your Glasgow novels. Have you talked to fellow Glaswegians about your portrayal of the city and its people?

I rarely like to talk about my work. It makes me feel I’m releasing energy I prefer to store. How many books can be just talked away before they’re written? The hardest question I ever get asked is, “And what are you writing now?” I can never find a suitable answer. I worry that if I describe it, I won’t write it. I worry about steam escaping from my head.

Your idea of an omnibus edition of the Glasgow novels is wonderful. But I always get the feeling they never quite ‘caught on’, despite some good reviews etc. Of course, when it comes to crime in Glasgow, people might rather watch “Taggart” than read about a melancholy Jewish cop like Perlman. Maybe there’s only room for one cop character in No Mean City.

With this native turf in mind as the setting for your fictional work, do you also have its people in mind as your new audience?

That never occurred to me. I wish it had. I wanted to write about them, sure, but I never really focused on them as a new audience. This is a failing of mine, perhaps, that I often write without taking a reader into account. Sometimes people have said they find books like The Bad Fire too complicated because of the number of characters. I don’t buy that, but that’s because I wrote the book.

A lot of people drifted in and out of the novel, certainly – a few made the cut into the second Perlman, The Last Darkness. And a few remained in White Rage, some of them with decent roles. Perlman’s spinster aunts; his superior, Scullion; the sadistic cop Latta. A few made cameo appearances. But there was always a different villain in each novel, and a different set of crimes. And in the last novel Butcher, I stoked up a love-interest for Perlman – which came more or less out of nowhere.

Which of your many novels would you recommend to a first time reader of Campbell Armstrong?

The Bad Fire – it’s filled with that meaty Glasgow subtext, sectarianism. My own favourite is Butcher, which is whackier, and has some very odd people flitting in and out, and because the underlying crime – which I won’t reveal – is one that a lot of readers don’t latch on to. Then again, it’s not exactly tasteful. So I didn’t play it up enough. It simmers, so to speak, in the recesses of the story.

Have you written the one novel you set out to write over four decades ago?

No. I never will. I always believe there’s at least one bloody great amazing novel waiting to be sprung free. But I have a sense it will hit me when I’m on my deathbed, too late, too late… I’ll look at my deathbed visitors – assuming there are any – and I’ll utter the first sentence. And that’ll be the last of that book.

On that note, what’s next for you and your audience?

Ah. Right now I would love to get beyond a book in which characters are killed. I’d like to write a book that’s all mystery with no solutions. The kind the reader thinks, “What the hell was that about?”, and then throws the book at a wall in annoyance. But potent market forces are against this idea. And, after all, why write if not to draw in an audience rather than alienate them?

I also think it would be fun to write a novel in which the characters – rather than solve a crime – aren’t actually sure a crime has taken place. They’d spend all their time trying to prove something criminal has occurred, but they never find out what. That might be fun – another for a reader to throw at the wall.

Sometimes if I reflect on my books I wonder how many characters have actually been killed in the course of them. I feel uncomfortable about contributing to ‘violent’ entertainment. Or is this my own strange comfort zone? I don’t know.

Lately I’ve been working on a novel well outside the crime boundaries – perhaps I can describe it as ‘whimsical’, or ‘oddly mystical’. I don’t even know myself. Writing a book is like a blind person trying to read a map that isn’t in Braille.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

My pleasure, thanks for asking. Sorry if I wandered a bit, but I don’t often get asked such penetrating questions in the Bog!

Good luck with your next book.

I will probably need it. Luck, I mean.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ONE BOOK EVERYBODY SHOULD READ: The Bad Fire

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