To Pay The Ferryman, by Pat Black review: 'a good story, well told'

With a well-worked plot and credible, sympathetic characters, this is an enjoyable slice of Tartan Noir, writes Allan Massie

Pat Black | Contributed

Crime novels, especially perhaps Tartan Noir ones, tend to be long and, after a nasty killing, rather slow-moving. Doubtless this is what the public, and therefore publishers, want, but one sighs sometimes for the economy of William McIlvanney and, indeed, Georges Simenon. It's also because one corpse is rarely enough and often we hark back to an unsolved case, which makes for a lot of digging into the past. That is the case here, and, though it all works out convincingly, it does make for some tedious passages. That said, the story invites and holds one's attention.

It begins in what one may call classic Glasgow fashion, the body of a naked teenage girl being found in the Clyde with her throat cut. DI Lomond breaks the news to her mother in a sympathetic manner - he's a decent family man himself. He learns little, since the girl has been living away from home, but his search of her room shows that she has artistic talent. We learn she works in a club and is also independently making short costume films and posting them on the internet.

The girl also posts her art as a marine dancer; she thinks of herself as a selkie. This has Lomond tracking back to the cold case, a murder of another girl he worked on as a young officer. This took place on a country estate when there was a wild party and the young heir to the estate and a friend were suspects, though never charged. It's almost a rule in Tartan Noir that any member of the landed gentry must be a prime suspect. Twenty years on, the young man is now a Tory candidate in a coming election. Both young girls were active in the art world, and this demands examination. A celebrated painter, now knighted, has had dealings with both girls, as has his assistant. But is this a red herring?

As in almost all crime fiction now, much of the investigation is carried out using mobile phones and other such devices. One sometimes thinks there is no need for cops or even private eyes like Chandler's Marlowe to pound the mean streets. The dice, you feel, are loaded against wrong-doers, which is doubtless as it should be, but readers of crime fiction may find it less than gripping. Still, in any novel, no matter which genre, it's the characters who give a book life. Here the main three police detectives are well matched. Lomond is sympathetic and sometimes agreeably clumsy. His two sergearts, the cool Cara Smythe and and the rougher Slater, given to making bad jokes, make for an agreeable team, even though they seem to keep going on what sounds like horrible coffee from a kiosk. They are all honest and tolerable company for the reader, something not always the case in Tartan Noir.

Most of the novel works. There is one exception, however: a formidable Swedish woman, a feminist campaigner, who turns up in Glasgow to stage a demonstration accusing the police of failing to do their job. She is as disagreeable as she is unconvincing, but she too seems to have a connection with the cold case. In general however, though the plot is slow to develop, it is well worked and strains credulity much less than is the case in most crime novels.

I confess I began this novel with some misgivings, not least because the blurb, which often informs one's first impression, seemed a bit stale and unpromising. Yet it was all well enough done for my misgivings to have faded away by around page 40, and I found myself enjoying the novel, held by the characters and the author's ability to handle obligatory set-scenes, Lomond and Smythe’s visit to the father of the second murdered girl and the conversation with her local boyfriend being particularly good. In fact, there is an admirable sympathy to the book. The finale, when the murderer is taken, is somewhat unsatisfactory, but this is almost always the case. It certainly didn't spoil my enjoyment of a good story, well told, and featuring credible and often sympathetic characters.

To Pay The Ferryman, by Pat Black, Polygon, £9.99