A Bad, Bad Place, by Frances Crawford review: 'a damn good read'
Having graduated from Louise Welsh’s MLitt course at Glasgow University at the age of 60, Frances Crawford has gone on to produce a hugely impressive debut novel, writes David Robinson
Sixty words. That's the entire length of the first chapter of this hugely impressive debut novel, but it contains the whole book. Five days ago, Janey’s dog sniffed out a dead body when she took him out for a walk. Her gran wants her to take him out again, but she doesn’t want to go.
Turn a page and we realise that the story is being told in alternate chapters, that Janey’s gran Maggie is the other narrator, and that the two of them live in a Possilpark high-rise in the late Seventies. Maggie realises that Janey has been traumatised from having come across a young woman’s horribly mutilated corpse but worries that there might be more to it than that. Janey has been to confession three times since then and, as Maggie asks herself, “What does a 12-year-old have to confess?”
What indeed? That is what we read on to find out, at first even more than the identity of the killer, so immersively does Crawford take us inside the minds of her two central characters, as well as the Glasgow scheme where she herself grew up. This is a world where ice cream vans sell cigarettes and shoplifters go door to door with their wares, where everyone knows the police bully people and men like Maggie’s ex-husband always hit women where it won’t show but never hard enough that they’ll need a doctor. Violence and misogyny are ubiquitous - and that’s even before we discover that the body Janey found on an abandoned railway was the only child of the local hardman.
Traumatised, she has blocked out much of what she saw that morning and certainly won’t tell the police about “that thing I did”. As the weeks go by, though, she becomes increasingly fascinated by the murdered girl, even though they have so little in common, not least because “she went to one of those snobby places where they stay on for Highers and the rest of it”.
Meanwhile, in alternate chapters, we learn about Maggie’s life, first as a put-upon cleaner at the local pub, and then as a dispatcher for the hardman’s taxi company, though her memory often trips back to the times in the Fifties when her daughter was the same age as Janey. They’d often come to the local cafe: “Always a fern cake and a banana boat on my day off, always raspberry sauce down her front... It must’ve been winter, because Marie had on thon red knitted cardigan. My eyesight was still good enough for Arran patterns and it was a lovely thing.”
What’s all of that that got to do with the murder? Nothing at all. But crime fiction, as Louise Welsh points out on the MLitt course she teaches at Glasgow University - and from which Crawford graduated with distinction aged 60 - is never just about the crime. It’s about making the people it leaves in its wake - sometimes flailing, sometimes puzzled, sometimes hurt, sometimes trying to piece things together - believable.
The police won’t solve this. The media are way off beam. But sometimes, maybe when a neighbour drops round for a cup of tea, she will mention a district nurse who looked after her father and how she told him she used to be friends with that girl who was murdered. And maybe the jigsaw will shift just a little bit, while the conversation goes on to where Maggie got the fig rolls from, whether it was the Co-op or Galbraith’s, and we will be nudged nearer the truth.
Authenticity bubbles up here in all kinds of similar conversations, but even more so in the thoughts of this one young Glasgow girl and her gran. Because of this, I’m not sure whether A Bad, Bad Place would ever make a good film. But the ten publishers who bid for this book at auction two years ago were right about one thing: it’s a damn good read.
A Bad, Bad Place, by Frances Crawford, Bantam, £16.99
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