Review of The Quaker by Liam McIlvanney (2018, Harper Collins)

Glasgow, 1969. A group of detectives have spent months trying to catch The Quaker, a killer who has raped and murdered three women. Their investigation has ground to a halt and the media have turned on the team. Senior management decide to send in DI Duncan McCormack, a young, quickly rising detective to the team to review the investigation with a view to learning lessons and wrapping it up. He’s met with resentment. The case was meant to be the making of the team members, instead it’s become a blot on their careers. It doesn’t take McCormack long to spot the errors and new potential leads. Then a new murder is committed and the team have a firm suspect. McCormack is convinced they are chasing the wrong the man, but has difficulty persuading others. They need a conviction and closure. Instead, McCormack is left to solve the murders, though gaining justice may come with a heavy price.

Based loosely on the ‘Bible John’ serial killer case in Glasgow in the late 1960s, The Quaker charts the attempts of the police to catch a man who has raped and killed three woman after taking them to a local dance. Despite his public appearances and thousands of posters littering the city, months after the last death he’s still not been caught. The police have hit a wall. With no new deaths or leads senior management are looking to wrap up an expensive investigation. The story follows DI Duncan McCormack’s attempt to assess what went wrong and his slide into conducting his own investigation of the killings as he spots fresh connections. When a new murder is committed and a new suspect emerges, McCormack senses that it’s a setup, again defying the desired outcome and continuing his pursuit of the real Quaker. The story is fairly conventional police procedural that’s tightly plotted, with a couple of nice twists, and unfolds at a steady clip. McCormack is an interesting ‘loner’ character who has his own secrets, and there’s a strong sense of place, charting the social and geographical changes to Glasgow given the mass slum clearances and building of flats and new towns. Overall, a nicely told, engaging tale of vicious crime and internal police politics and rivalries.

Review of All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney (Faber and Faber, 2009)

Gerry Conway is a journalist with the Tribune on Sunday, a Scottish paper of record that is feeling the pinch given slowly declining sales and a recent take over. Newly divorced, with two young sons, Conway’s personal life is in the doldrums, and his professional life seems precarious given rationalisations at the paper. When he’s contacted about a story concerning the Scottish Justice Minister, Peter Lyons, he initially dismisses it out of hand, but a photograph from the early 1980s showing Lyons at a UVF gathering in Belfast changes his mind. He soon discovers that Lyons returned to Glasgow in 1983 fearing for his life, and after a narrow escape whilst snooping at a loyalist, Orange parade in Lyons’ home town, Conway heads to Belfast to try and discover the reason for Lyons’ apprehension. At the time Lyon’s fled, the UVF had been responsible for three murders and Conway suspects that Lyons had been involved in at least one of them, only nobody in Belfast is particularly keen to rake over the past and the story appears to be going nowhere until a chance encounter with a Scottish gangster.

All the Colours of the Town is what I would call an ‘okay read’. It wiled away a few hours pleasantly enough, but it didn’t bowl me over. In part, I think my ambivalence is partly a matter of taste, something I’m becoming more conscious of as I write reviews. As I’ve noted elsewhere, I prefer relatively fast paced stories, strong on dialogue and action, rather than introspective tales that devote a fair chunk of the narrative to the inner thoughts of the lead voice. All the Colours of the Town has a good sized chunk of introspection, but for me it also has issues with padding and pacing. To take one example of padding, at one point there is a totally unnecessary paragraph describing a hotel cleaning cart. If it were removed, it would make absolutely no difference to the story, so why is it there? There are countless other descriptive passages that are really not needed and add little to the plot. With respect to pacing, the story seems to come in spurts separated with introspective lulls, and the ending is too hurried with one of the central characters falling out of view. For me, I think the book needed tightening up – if it lost 30-40 pages whilst retaining the same plot it would jaunt along at a nice, even pace. That said, the characterisation is fine and the story is interesting enough, and the book provides a contemporary companion of sorts to Stuart Neville’s The Twelve, with a Scottish twist on violence, politicians with shady pasts and Northern Ireland (my review here).