Book reviews: Paperboy by Callum McSorley | Greater Sins by Gabriel Griffiths

These two new Scottish genre novels both have their moments, but neither of them quite ignites the proverbial heather, writes Stuart Kelly

“Genre” has never been an accurate term, but it is increasingly one of very limited use. Both these novels might be described as “genre” writing; but, at the risk of sounding like Polonius in Hamlet, lauding pastoral-comical and tragical-historical plays, one is a tartan noir comedy crime with a dash of hard-boiled grit and the other is a feminist period mystery with heady undertones of rural gothic. I suppose the most useful review would be to note the price: if these are the kinds of books you like, you probably don’t mind waiting for the paperback.

I hadn’t read the first novel by McSorley – Squeaky Clean – but you don’t need to have to understand what is going on in Paperboy. It again features DCI “Ally” McCoist, still breaking rather than stretching the law, and still not finding jokes about her name funny. This time her narrative is offset with that of “Chuck” Gardner, owner of the titular paper-shredding business, who has gambling debts and is spiralling into the company of organised criminals attached to McCoist’s previous murky case. He is nicknamed after a character in the cartoon Rugrats (1991-2004), which, alongside references such as one criminal’s love of wrestling stars like Stone Cold Steve Austin and nods to Face/Off and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves rather prematurely dates the novel. I don’t remember Agatha Christie referring to the release of Snow White or A Day at the Races or Bradman being the first captain to win a five-match series after losing the first two Tests.

Callum McSorley | Colin Mearns

A paper-shredder is Chekhov’s gun here, and someone duly ends up in it, although I spent far too much time considering the feasibility of such a death. It all trots along at a fair pace, and I practically expected a “Next Time On...” trailer for Book number three. Given the titles of the first two, I reckon Curl Up And Die or Stake Bake must be contenders. Sue Grafton quickly tired of gimmicky titles. McSorley won the McIlvanney Prize for his debut, but it seems to me that in terms of icons, it is more appropriately the result of the Big Yin-ification of Scottish prose: when in doubt, say jobby. It bills itself as a “shitemire” but this is an adequate sample: “No f***in way wis it Colin. It wis they car-wash c***s…. and the polis are daein f*** aw tae find them… how hard could it f***in be? They’re no like a pair ae f***in Einsteins, are they? They work in a f***in car wash, thir no the Kray twins. Penn and f***in Teller just disappearin aff the stage. Moan tae f***”. Realism, I suppose, of a sort.

That one character’s dog urinates on a carved poem by Jackie Kay rather sums it up, especially as their companion quips they probably prefer Peter Kay. Though there are moments of supposed suspense, I couldn’t care a fiddle for the characters. The editor, by the way, is thanked for being a champion at “Scottish or typo”? Scots, surely?

Gabrielle Griffiths | Sophie Davidson

Greater Sins is a more sophisticated piece, with the narrative rallying between Johnny, an itinerant labourer who fancies himself a troubadour of sorts, and Lizzie, the lonely wife of the local landowner who was lonely even before he left for the war. A woman’s body is unearthed during peat-cutting, and it is clear her death was no accident. Isolation, old grudges, the looming foreboding of the war all become focussed on the discovery, and misfortunes and accidents are soon attributed to it.

Griffiths does a good job of keeping the possibility of the supernatural in play, and there is a neat counterpoint between the eerily unearthed and the hastily buried financial and nuptial secrets that underpin class structures. Richard Strachan’s recent The Unrecovered did a similar triangulation of war, class and the eldritch, with less predictable and more effective results.

Griffiths back-writes certain mind-sets in a way Strachan avoided. For example, one character here opines “Women who were healers or midwives or poor, or couldnae have children. Women who spoke their minds or had a man they werenae married to. Women who just so happened to be in the room when a pail of milk turned sour… I daresay they’d have called me a witch back then”. I feel that such ideas were much stronger when they were unvoiced and inferred in the narrative, as in works as seemingly conservative as Barrie’s Farewell Miss Julie Logan or even The Little Minister. We seem to have come quite far from Hartley’s past being a foreign country, where they do things differently.

Again, the Puritans here are one-dimensional and automatically black-marked in the text, with little room for exploring their psychologies. Nevertheless, the novel is atmospheric and controlled. The set piece scenes – a ceilidh, a society party, a secret initiation – would do well on the stage, and that might curb some of the over-writing; which, as is often the case, occurs especially in the opening pages where Griffiths tries hard to make much of having a nip (syruped beauty, peat-sweet, a sigh in the nose, the land made liquid and such).

Both authors may go on to write more interesting work. As it is, neither quite sets the heather, or the wheelie-bin, on fire.

Paperboy, by Callum McSorley, Pushkin Vertigo, £16.99

Greater Sins, by Gabrielle Griffiths, Doubleday, £16.99

Read more: The Mouthless Dead, by Anthony Quinn review: ‘gripping'