Alex Kane (2023) Janey.

Local author, Alex Kane, (a pseudonym) tends to write what you know. Janey slots into the genre of Scottish Noir also known as Tartan Noir. Writing is a verb, not a noun. This is Kane’s ninth book. She does her talking on the page. Lets the gods of Amazon decide. Most writers tend to be women. Eight out of ten readers are women and they prefer heroines rather than heroes. A virtuous circle. The protagonists in Kane’s novels tend to be women you might know or have met. Janey Hallahan is described as being like Queen Elizabeth II. Her faithful husband, Carian, gets the bumbling role of Prince Philip.  But in noir fiction, a crime has been committed. Sometimes it may be a crime against humanity. And we’re not just talking about royalty or would-be royalty, with the royal ‘we’, instead of I. Think Maggie Thatcher. Instead of the Iron Lady running Britain, and Scotland into the ground with experiments such as the Poll Tax—as shown in Dougie Bain’s Booker winner, Shuggie Bain (with its boyish image of crucifixion on the title pages setting the tone) and his follow-up novel, Young Mungo—Janey Hallahan imports and exports illegal drugs. Her face is on the cover. She runs a criminal empire from Ireland in all the major British cites, but she’s inherited a problem—Danny McInroy. He wants to be Glasgow’s drug king.

The godfather of Tartan Noir, William McIlvanney’s books featured working-class characters. In particular, his series of Laidlaw novels, Detective Laidlaw didn’t set out to solve a crime, but to solve humanity. Taggart on STV was Laidlaw’s bastard child. And it allows me to re-use one of my favourite lines. Everybody in Glasgow was an extra on Taggart, even if they werenae, a murder had been committed and you were suspect.

Plotter or pantser? The latter is the technical term that smug writers use. The queen of Scottish Noir, in terms of money and sales, Val McDermid, for example, is a plotter. Each of her characters has a file on them. She knows where they are going. And what they are doing and why.  Like metre in poetry, it allows for innovation. Words matter. But as an ex-reporter, she knows how to write copy and how it will all end.

McIlvanney, I suspect, like Alex Kane, was more a seat of his pantser. Plots were turnips grew. Characters led. The author follows taking testaments and waiting to see who will be crucified.  

Alex Kane’s characters are familiar to most Glaswegians and Bannkies. We know who the drug kings are, the cars they drive, and even where they live. On the knotted file card in my head, I’ve got a gangster who told me his cock was sore, he was sick of shagging. He’d four different birds on the go, including what he called a Chinky one, whose dad he supplied, but the old guy didn’t know. The gangster went to Sunday Mass, and Communion, but not to Confession to wash away his sins. He laughed, he couldn’t trust anybody. No revelation about love or death. He didn’t see himself as a bad guy. He supported local charities.

Janey Hallahan, in the same way, views herself as successful business woman that will do what it takes to keep on top. The opening scene is set near Old Kilpatrick, where I live. Old Dalnottar Crematorium and Cemetery. My mum and dad and brother have a headstone there, but I’ll avoid having one for a wee bit longer, hopefully.

Cancer kills more than half of us, mostly auld yins, and in Janey more than any serial killer. It might even grow into what might be called a theme. Geo McInroy, Danny’s stepdad, dies of it. He ran Glasgow, but what most folk don’t know is he ran it for Finn and his daughter, Janney Hallahan. I’d guess he’s modelled on Arthur Thompson. And like Arthur Thompson, his son, Arthur Thompson (junior) also called Fatboy, couldn’t hold his dad’s legacy together. But Danny isn’t Fatboy. He’s a pretty boy. Women are drawn to him. And he is street-smart.

At his stepdad’s funeral,     

‘Danny wanted to smash Janey’s face in. He knew he was trying to push his buttons. And it was working, but he wasn’t going to allow her to see that.

Janey was the most powerful women he’d ever known, and it grated on him because women had only ever let Danny down in his life. Women didn’t deserve to have power and control. Especially not women in their fifties, although Danny didn’t know Janey’s exact age. He guessed early fifties.’

Matricide and misogyny versus Janey. But the reader knows who’ll win, or the book would be called Danny.

In McIlvanney’s novels police and civic corruption are rare beasts. In contrast, Massimo Carlotto, The Goodbye Kiss, the prettyboy protagonist and sociopath banks on the cops being on the take. Here prettyboy Danny has five senior detectives (DCIs) on the take. He pays Councillor Derek Liddle of Glasgow City Council over a thousand quid a month. They are at his private-member’s club, Club Envy (owned by Jenny Hallahan) and he’s set each of them up with an escort. But Danny wants his money’s worth.

The ‘Wee Man,’ Paul Ferris walked free from alleged murder of ‘Fatboy’ from the High Court in the eighties. He claimed  civic and police corruption was rife in Glasgow. Ferris named The Licensee, Thomas ‘Tam’ McGraw as being a police grass, and Thompson senior of setting up his rivals in a quid pro quo with DCIs.

Danny takes this pro-quo a bit further. He gets DCI Stephens and his best mate, Rory, to dig a shallow grave and help bury his murdered girlfriend and his past.

Danny’s still rising. The reader is about half-way through 356 pages. There’s always space for change. The Carbeth huts, where the body is buried, is a beauty spot. Ralph Glasser, Growing Up in the Gorbals, is a book I always return. His journey from boyhood to manhood and meeting fellow travellers on the hills. An old bus converted into a store. Talk of the Wobblies, Communism and world revolution. The world turned upside down. A grand setting for Janey to stash her drugs in the lockups and take back what was hers.

Audio versions of novels are a growing market. I’d think Janey would take about a working day, or eight hours to listen to. A female narrator. If I’d the job of editing Janey, I’d lose about 15 000 words. That’s another story. Read on.