Book review: The Hanging Shed by Gordon Ferris

Published on Thursday 17 March 2011 12:37

The Hanging Shed BY GORDON FERRIS Corvus , 320pp, £15.99

The opening page of The Hanging Shed, the fourth crime novel from Gordon Ferris but the first in a new series, carries a nod to the master of detective fiction, with a preface quote from Raymond Chandler ("I'll take the big sordid dirty crowded city", it reads, from The Long Goodbye). If you're reaching for literary inspiration, might as well start at the top.

"He was a careworn clerk in a bad suit with too much in his in-tray and not enough in his out," notes Ferris's hero Douglas Brodie, in hard-boiled mould, encountering the deputy govenor of Barlinnie prison. "I left him to gnaw his desk or whatever he did to control his inner rages."

Ferris began his career working as an RAF programmer on guided missiles and tactical nuclear arms, then worked in Pricewaterhouse Coopers's banking division. He spent years writing on long-haul flights, according to his resume before going full-time.

One chapter in, it's clear Ferris has a knack for pushing a yarn along. Three chapters in, you start guessing authors he was reading on the planes: Chandler, obviously, but maybe Walter Mosley, who like Chandler uses Los Angeles as his setting, but chose to create period post-war mysteries with his black, war veteran hero, Easy Rawlins.

Ferris has chosen Glasgow, immediately after the Second World War, as his setting. The Hanging Shed - the title refers to the old place of execution at Barlinnie - become a best-seller on Kindle over Christmas, albeit at a discount 1 download price. It comes with a glowing endorsement from Val McDermid, calling Ferris "the natural heir of Stevenson and Buchan. His writing has a great feel for authenticity and drive."

Drive it certainly has. Ferris can write Brodie into knife and gun brawls and shotgun shoot-outs that set the pulse racing. Authenticity and originality need work.

It is Buchanesque - the characters are two-dimensional, the conspiracy pretty ludicrous - but he can turn on a good action scene, and carries the reader through his story like an unstoppable armoured plough.

Brodie is enlisted to save his one-time friend, now a hideously maimed former bomber rear gunner, from a death sentence for child murder, facing a case "as watertight as a Clyde steamer".

It was a boyhood friendship across the sectarian divide - "he'd call me a proddy sod and I'd call him a Papish pig" but now the man has a face "like something stitched together by a one-handed seamstress".

Most authors might choose a former war hero, or former detective, or crime reporter as their hero. Ferris goes for all three, though his central character, Brodie, is a strong one with a strong voice.But as the story progresses, the plotting and villains lack original twists or character.

Why does every crime novel have to involve a torture chamber and the murder and rape of children? The post-war Glasgow setting is promising but it's under-developed and too obvious. Megalomaniac crime bosses, erring Catholic priests, the IRA - he tosses in the kitchen sink.

If he can move away from the clich and perhaps take a little more time, Ferris could go well beyond run-of-the-mill Tartan Noir.