Gordon J.Brown (2023) No More Games.

I take it Gordon Brown added an initial J. (middle-name) to his name, so he doesn’t get confused with the dour Raith Rover supporter and former Prime Minister (author of a 1999 Blairite victory, economic policy from Number 11 Downing Street).

Gordon J. Brown’s debut novel takes the reader back to the 1974. There’s a picture of miner’s leader Joe Gormley in the Daily Record that year, facing down Tory Prime Minister, Edward Heath that epitomises who wore the long trousers, when a snap General Election was called. Background music:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtiaReNsHOo

Chapter 1. ‘The Day It All Started.’

‘JESUS GINGER,’ says Milky. ‘He’s not dead.’

The man rolls over and yawns.

‘No kidding,’ I reply.

The narrator is twelve-year-old Ginger Bannerman. He kept a diary. The reader is taken back to the inciting incident in 1974, when he and his best mate, Milky found a body in their den, which wasn’t a body. The man stinks and had a gun.

But there’s also ‘The Conversation’. The equivalent of voice-over in films, in which two adults are talking. It’s part of the story, yet not part of the story. Like God and predestination. I’m more agnostic than atheist to that idea.

Ginger and Milky live in Simshill. You’d be hard placed to know where that is. The voice-over gives us the reader a clue. Laidlaw. Detective Laidlaw. Here we’re at the roots of Tartan Noir. Laidlaw didn’t set out to solve a crime. He was our Glaswegian Plato that set out to solve the world. Some of us are old enough to remember when cops got allocated houses with their jobs. Simshill is cop town, were the fictional Laidlaw lived.

Ginger and Milky’s dads are Glasgow beat cops. Castlemilk is on their doorstep. ‘A desert wae windaes,’ was how Billy Connolly described the scheme he grew up in, Drumchapel. Gordon J.Brown pushes open the windows and lets the reader look through and breathe in what’s happening.

What’s happening plot-wise is Heartbreak Hart is planning something big. She’s planning to move out of the modern slums of Castlemilk and takeover Glasgow (from the equivalent of a fictional Godfather, Arthur Thompson). It involves tapping cops and turning them. Bribing them and making them work for her. But she’s been careless and made a tape. If it falls into the wrong hands…

Ginger, and to a lesser extent, Milky, don’t know if the wrong hands are the right hands, because their dads might be involved. They might be on the tape and on the take.

A coming-of-age novel in which Ginger needs to grow up quicker than he’d like and do the right thing, which might be the wrong thing. In other words, just the type of novel, I devour and ask for more crumbs. Read on.  

https://bit.ly/bannkie