Weekend Deviation – 1950s Glasgow Noir

Never was there a city more suited to the noir genre than Glasgow! Yet, it’s not been the subject of that much noir writing traditionally. It’s been a while since I’ve recommended a crime writer here so I’ll plug the two Lennox novels by Craig Russell (here and here) – I just scoffed them both down over the holidays and they left a suitably bad Weegie madness taste! Early 1950s Glasgow is well done – decades before Glasgow Smiles Better and Years of Culture, pre-high rise flats and pre the Clean Air Act. Still, the Glaswegian gangsters are tough, the hardmen hard and the Glasgow girls gorgeous but with a bad dose of ‘Gorbals gob’! Well worth a read and hopefully they’ll be more in the series. Blurbs below as usual.

Glasgow, 1953: the war may be over but the battle for the streets is just beginning. Three crime bosses control the murky streets, but a small-scale con is trying to invade their territory. The balance is shifting. Lennox, a hard man in a hard city at a hard time, finds himself caught in the middle – a dangerous place to be. One night, a body is discovered on the road, his head mashed to pulp, and Lennox is in the frame for murder. The only way of proving his innocence is to solve the crime – but he’ll have to dodge men more deadly than Glasgow’s crime bosses before he gets any answers.

And the second one – The Long Glasgow Kiss:

Glasgow in the 1950s – not somewhere you’d choose to be unless you were born to it. Yet Lennox, a private investigator, finds it oddly congenial. Lennox is a man balanced between the law and those who break it – a dangerous place where only the toughest and most ruthless survive. Glasgow bookie and greyhound breeder, Jimmy ‘Small Change’ MacFarlane, runs one of the biggest operations at Glasgow’s dog-racing track. When MacFarlane is bludgeoned to death with a bronze statue of Danny Boy, his best racer, Lennox has a solid gold alibi – he had spent the night with MacFarlane’s daughter. Lennox is quickly drawn into hunting MacFarlane’s killer, where he soon discovers that ‘Small Change’ was into a lot more than dog racing. Worse, crime boss Willie Sneddon, one of Glasgow’s notorious Three Kings, is clearly involved and he’s not a man Lennox wants to cross. But somewhere out there in the shadows lurks a really big player, an elusive villain who makes the Three Kings look like minnows. Lennox is the only man who can track him down.