Book review: The Darker the Night, by Martin Patience
Set sometime in the near-ish future, in the run-up to another referendum on Scottish independence, The Darker the Night is a heady blend of police procedural and political thriller. With only a few days to go until the vote, nationalist First Minister Susan Ward appears to be on course for a historic victory. However, when a senior civil servant called John Millar is found shot dead in an alleyway in central Glasgow with an unlikely phone number in his possession, all bets are off. Conspiracy theories swirl around social media, riots break out in the streets and opinion polls swing wildly back and forth with each twist and turn of the ensuing police investigation.
Charged with solving the case by quarter-past-yesterday is Detective Sergeant David "Big Davy" Bryant – perhaps not the most athletic officer in the west of Scotland, but one who more than makes up for his lack of physical fitness with good instincts, an encyclopaedic knowledge of his home turf and some questionable but undoubtedly very handy underworld connections. When he calls the phone number found on Millar's body he gets the surprise of his life – and so decides to share his discovery with his pal Fulton McKenzie, who just-so-happens to be a reporter on fictional Glasgow newspaper, The Siren.
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Hide AdMcKenzie is a hack of the old school, driven purely by the love of the game and thoroughly uninterested in generating traffic for the newspaper's website, no matter how many times his well-spoken English editor explains the precarious economics of 21s century journalism. In the end, he is permitted to pursue his scoop on his own terms, but to describe his relationship with his editor as "strained" as the story unfolds would be putting it mildly.
And so our two heroes set to work, each using their own methods to get to the bottom of the Millar killing, Bryant via his links with local gangland boss Trilby Tam; McKenzie by doorstepping and subsequently building up a rapport with Millar's fragile sister, Elaine, a former nurse who now suffers from motor neurone disease. Meanwhile, we get regular insights into how the First Minister and her no-nonsense advisor, Brian Mulvey, are dealing with the various developments in the case; and the waters are muddied considerably by the arrival at Strathclyde Police HQ of a mysterious secret service operative called Neil.
If that sounds like a lot of plot to crunch through in a shade over 250 pages that's because it is, but Patience – a BBC foreign correspondent for 15 years – manages to keep things rattling along with pleasing efficiency. True, if you're a fan of elaborate scene-setting and complex, therapist's couch-style profiling of key characters, this might not be the book for you, and we are certainly a very long way away, here, from the kind of ornate, every-syllable-counts prose that tends to emanate from postgraduate creative writing courses.
Then again, in amongst all the breathless racing from plot point A to plot point B, Patience does scatter enough detail about the principal actors to prevent them from turning into cardboard cut-outs. McKenzie's loss of his wife and son in a car accident some years previously, and his convincingly awkward interactions with his teenage daughter, help give him a relatable emotional hinterland, and the scenes involving Ward's two daughters and long-suffering husband are similarly well done.
Also, importantly, the dialogue Patience writes has the ring of truth to it. It's surprising how many otherwise well-written books stumble at this particular hurdle, with authors using conversations as a means of dumping reams of clunky exposition. The characters in The Darker the Night, however – and McKenzie and Bryant, in particular – manage to converse like everyday humans.
It's difficult to say much about a book like this without spoiling the ending, but I don't think it's giving anything away to say that the overarching message, if there is one, is that some things in life are more important than politics – even when it comes to a seemingly existential question like independence.
The Darker the Night, by Martin Patience, Polygon, 262pp, £9.99