The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Dark deeds in Linlithgow
mind how abstract and mysterious, possibly even mystical, a concept “India” remained in the British establishment psyche.
And this is, of course, the problem. Our common understanding of India is so conditioned by fiction and poetry that we often neglect to understand that the reality was far more extraordinary, in the sense both of exoticism and ordinariness. We still see India through the prism of EM Forster and Paul Scott, when we really also need to see it through Kipling’s eyes as well. He wrote about the dirt and the diarrhoea and the pox as well as the men who would be king, the adventurers and heroes who would be forced to come back and die at Passchendaele, or retire to a cottage in Margate.
It is rather pointless to pick specimen lives from Gilmour’s account. They don’t work other than in juxtaposition and in number. He has processed a vast amount of documentary evidence which is why, when he explores one of the guiltiest running themes of empire, he doesn’t resort to the lazy broad-brush of Jeremy Paxman’s Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British, in which a man famed for asking “difficult” questions fails to ask the important ones. To Paxman, the Empire served as a field of sexual opportunity for younger sons, the unsettled, cads and bounders, men with pasts. Even on this obviously racy topic, Gilmour makes us think and does ask key questions. Relations between British men and their wives and bibis, relations between and among the races, the exact nature of what “Eurasian” is, or “Anglo-Indian” (and both of these changed significantly over time).
GILMOUR takes the story from the 16th century when a passage to India might take years, to the 20th century, when BOAC could take you there within a day, and maintain some measure of “home” comfort until the doors opened on the tarmac and the heat and smell came flooding in. Everyone who has gone to the subcontinent remembers that moment. Opening the pages of Gilmour’s book has very much that impact. Having a reading copy that still lacks an index or illustrations is actually something of an advantage. The pictures formed by his words are far more vivid than any stock prints, and there is no chance of using its 600 pages as a reference book. It simply has to be read, over and over again.
OF all the places for a criminal defence lawyer to be operating, a small practice in Linlithgow is far from the most likely to bring in profitable, high-profile cases.
But that’s the charm of William McIntyre’s hero Robbie Munro, who works well away from the seedy centres of criminal activity but somehow never fails to find trouble. The fourth “Best Defence” novel finds Munro settled down with new wife Joanna, his father and brother Malky living within shouting distance and his six-year-old daughter a constant presence who has to be continually shooed out of the room so Robbie can discuss a case.
And he has not one but two cases to juggle in this latest instalment. Ricky Hertz, convicted of killing three children in the West Lothian town, has just been released, pending an appeal, after 18 years in prison. Hertz was convicted on the basis of a dubious confession and evidence provided by Robbie’s father, a retired policeman, evidence which is now being disputed.
Robbie is in a predicament which seems to have no easy way out. Out of family loyalty, he has no choice but to defend his father, but if the old cop really did plant evidence it goes against all the defence lawyer’s instincts to see an innocent man put back inside. At the same time, an old girlfriend, Jill, re-enters Munro’s life, years after she ditched him for Hercule, the multi-millionaire boss of a pharmaceutical company, who has been found dead of a barbiturate overdose in an upmarket Edinburgh hotel. Jill is convinced that he was murdered and wants her old boyfriend to investigate, a hard request to turn down when it comes with £15,000 and a trip to Rome.
The mystery of Hercule’s death is a bit of a puzzler involving wealthy relatives, one of whom may have wanted rid of him. But it’s the Hertz case that McIntyre has invested with the best twists and turns, the most intractable dilemmas and the highest stakes. It’s cleverly enough devised that the author can even present Munro with a neatly wrapped solution to his dilemma, knowing that his creation is too good a man to use it.
McIntyre’s legal knowledge keeps the plot firmly rooted in Scots law, and he’s clearly a fan of old-school detective fiction too, bestowing on Stitch Up a kind of “tartan noir” version of that hard-boiled tone. (“I let go of Jill like she was the smooth side of a toasted bagel” was my favourite.) But that does have the downside of making the characters’ dialogue very arch and knowing, as though they’re feeding each other lines all the time, and they have an annoying habit of appearing unannounced in doorways at just the right moment to hear something that concerns them.
McIntyre’s greatest strength is not naturalistic speech. But that’s a minor flaw in what is otherwise a compelling, well-plotted mystery which, thanks to its small-town setting, makes a plot concerning serial child-murderers and millionaire chief executives feel almost homely.