Book of the week

The Quaker by Liam McIlvanney (Harper Collins) $35

Apart from holding the Stuart Chair in Scottish Studies at the University of Otago, and being the author of various academic papers, Liam McIlvanney has also published three works of crime fiction. His second, Where the Dead Men Go, won the Ngaio Marsh award last year. The Quaker is his third and is as good a crime novel as has come my way for a while.

One should not be surprised, given McIlvanney’s day job, that the idea for The Quaker sprang from the depredations of a Scottish serial killer dubbed by media ‘‘Bible John’’. He added to the horrors of life in Glasgow in the 1960s and was never caught – something that leaves one wondering where he is now.

The Quaker’s criminal penchant is to inveigle his way into the lives of young women in a dance hall and murder them in horrifying ways and to leave them as so much trash in places where they will be readily found. The cop on his trail is DI Duncan McCormack, originally from the Highlands, but used to city life and its tough policing. A group of detectives have been after the Quaker for many months but have made no progress. They resent McCormack being placed amongst them, drafted from the Flying Squad. The life of the expert from outside is never easy.

McCormick is a fine protagonist, a crime fiction DI who could well stick in the memory. In the way of all such heroes, he is slightly flawed and, in spite of having a fine sense of how to find his way through the murk of the Glasgow underworld, there is about him a believable ordinariness.

So, he becomes easy to identify with, in most ways, although not perhaps all.

What makes Scottish crime writers so good? They are direct, gritty, thoughtful, compelling, insightful, and terrific storytellers; it is impossible for a non-Scot to (or this one, anyway) to understand how this comes about. Perhaps it’s the whisky. Just think of Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Stuart MacBride, Denise Mina.

And now there is McIlvanney, whose writing is just as thoughtfully intricate as Rankin’s. He is good at gritty too, shepherding the reader through the rough side of life in 1960s Glasgow. DI McCormack’s life and times are not as gritty as MacBride’s DS Logan’s. But that would be hard to match and somehow would not be quite right for the character.

I highly recommend The Quaker. It is clever, fast-paced and intricately satisfying. The characters, plot and atmosphere are all convincing, overall making one pleased not to have been living in the city at the time.

McIlvanney is up there with the best of the British crime writers and we are fortunate to have him here in New Zealand.

–

The Quaker is clever, fast-paced and intricately satisfying.