Noir question

Do academics take Scottish crime writing as seriously as they ought, asks Matt McGuire

MOST literary histories of Scotland neglect crime fiction. They stick to the canonical, the critically acclaimed, the culturally significant, the Burnses, the Scotts, the Stevensons of this world. Vernacular poetry, Romantic fiction, Gothic horror – this is the stuff of Scottish Literature. But tartan noir? Isn’t that just a piece of clever marketing dreamed up by London publishers? Certainly James Ellroy’s phrase, originally a descriptor of Ian Rankin, has become a catch-all cry for crime writing with a Scottish connection. The net is cast wide, scooping up writers as varied as Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Louise Welsh and Allan Guthrie, to name but a few. Yet if you can have a Scandinavian school of crime fiction – think Sjöwall & Wahlöö, Mankell, Nesbø – can you have a Scottish one?

It turns out that you can. Just as husband and wife Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, writing in the 1960s, paved the way with the Martin Beck series, recent Scottish crime writers are not without their own native forbears. Indeed, when I looked back at the course in Scottish literature I taught at Glasgow University between 2006 and 2011, I realised that I had in fact been running a course on Scottish crime fiction.

Exhibit A – James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). A portrait of the serial killer as a young man. A religiously (mis)guided Robert Wringham pursues a holy mission, murdering the sinful inhabitants of this, our irreparably fallen world. Nowadays, we are familiar with this plot. Think of the film Seven. Hogg’s novel also features a proto-detective, an Editor figure, out to unravel the truth behind the gruesome events.

Next we might turn to Stevenson and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The book is interested in the moral hypocrisy of the Victorian age, in the dangers of unfettered scientific progress and in mankind’s inner animal. Modern readers forget that the entire tale is structured like a detective story. Utterson is cast as the disciplined investigator, tasked with ascertaining the disappearance and suspected blackmail of his good friend Dr Henry Jekyll. The year after Jekyll and Hyde the world witnessed the birth of Sherlock Holmes, the most iconic and enduring figure in the history of crime fiction. The Holmes stories make sacrosanct the power of the rational mind, scientific observation and the cultural values of British Empire. They a reminder of the importance of Edinburgh, the great city of the Enlightenment, to the formative years of the character’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle. All of these texts influence the shape of recent Scottish crime fiction. A broader history of crime writing in Scotland would include Blackwood’s tales of terror, accounts of the Burke & Hare murders, David Ashton’s tales of James McLevy (Edinburgh’s Victorian detective), the work of John Buchan (the forefather of the modern thriller) and Josephine Tey (author of the Alan Grant series).

Reportage, memoir, fiction – the evolution of the genre is not some neat and orderly affair. The same applies to questions of influence. The black American detective John Shaft is just as important to Rebus as anything local. And Louise Welsh might draw on Stevenson, but her work is equally illuminated by way of the German poet Maria Rainer Rilke.

So the question remained – did the notion of “tartan noir” make any sense? And where would you begin to answer such a question? A thought occurred – surely the best way to understand the crime novel was to go ahead and write one. This is what I did. The result was Dark Dawn, the first novel in the DS O’Neill series.

Graham Greene once said, “Everything I needed to know to be a writer happened to me before I was 18”. With this in mind I turned to Belfast, to Northern Ireland, the place I’d called home for the first two decades of my life. I took what I’d learned from Scottish crime writing. From Ian Rankin, I saw that place and setting, the scene of the crime, are living breathing characters. They shape the story just as much as the cops and criminals do. Local history, urban myth, popular folklore – these are the stuff of Rankin’s Edinburgh. They remind us that beneath the headlines, beyond the corporate and political spin, there is another city, another reality waiting to be disclosed.

Denise Mina taught me about anger and about audience. In 1998 she had been researching a PhD on mental illness and female offenders, teaching criminology on the side, when she penned the first of the Garnethill novels. Mina talks of wanting to connect with people, of getting her ideas out there, of taking them beyond an academic audience and a single digit readership. It was politics by the back door.

And Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room (2003) showed that a crime novel didn’t have to follow the rules. They were there, but they were there to be borrowed, to be bent, and in some cases, to be broken altogether.

All these things were brought to bear on Dark Dawn and its depiction of post-conflict Northern Ireland. The book follows DS O’Neill, a detective in the newly formed Police Service of Northern Ireland. We meet Joe Lynch, a man with a past, trying to move on in a city that doesn’t want to let him. And there’s Marty and Petesy, a couple of teenage hoods, doing what it takes to survive in the brave new North. The book is about a society in transition, about the hand of history, about waking up with a hangover after 25 years of civil war.

So to return to our question – is there a Scottish crime fiction? The answer is yes, there is. We need to be careful though – this thing’s contagious.

• Matt McGuire’s Dark Dawn is published by Corsair, priced £11.99. His Scottish Crime Fiction is published by Palgrave Mcmillan next year.