Murder in the Scots art world

Polygon, £9.99

IN Edinburgh author Philip Miller’s debut novel, The Blue Horse, a troubled art historian explored the provenance of a lost painting, even questioning whether it actually existed. After the more fantastic, metaphysical concerns of its follow-up, All the Galaxies, he returns to similar themes here.

Thomas Tallis (namesake of the 16th Century composer, but not especially proud of it) has been despatched to Edinburgh to authenticate a painting purported to be Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s final work, a beautiful watercolour of the Goldenacre area of Edinburgh. It’s being donated to the nation in lieu of inheritance tax following the death of one Lord Melrose, and will be exhibited in Edinburgh’s

Public Gallery. Tallis is to confirm, on behalf of the government, that it’s the genuine article so the transfer can go ahead.

Tallis’s arrival is preceded by whispers about the circumstances under which he left his previous job, at the Civic Gallery in London. A sad, defeated figure described as “a crumpled man, with large eyes, wearing a cord suit” and later as resembling “a kicked dog”, he struggles under the weight of his impending divorce and loss of parental custody as well as his tarnished reputation. His father was Raymond Tallis, former deputy director of MI6, but he has no idea where he is and is under orders to contact the old spy only “in the event of life-threatening illness, or death”.

Just as Tallis is arriving in the city, 67-year-old artist Robert

Love, one of the New Glasgow Boys of the 1980s, is brutally murdered in his Stockbridge flat. Edinburgh Post journalist Shona Sandison is tipped off by a departing colleague that Love’s death might be a story worth pursuing, and it’s swiftly followed by the murder of Councillor John

Cullen, who has just persuaded the Planning Committee to vote against the establishment of a new film studio at South Queensferry.

Tallis has only one task to perform, examining the painting, but he’s continually prevented from carrying it out by a boss who basically just wants him to rubberstamp the transfer. Then he gets a nasty surprise in the post, which can only be read as a warning.

It’s not hard for the reader to work out how Love’s murder and the Goldenacre painting fit together. The pleasure is to be found in watching two such different but well-realised protagonists following their separate lines of enquiry and knowing that if they could only compare notes they’d get the answers they seek far faster. Miller, a former Herald arts reporter, though, spends most of the book preventing their paths from crossing, and he keeps the police investigation on the periphery of the story too. Both are scarred people facing uncertain futures, but the beleaguered Sandison, who walks with a stick after being attacked while working on a previous story, makes a good contrast to the wretched, passive Tallis. Frustrated and angry as her ailing newspaper prepares to move online, she lives with her dad, occasionally accompanying him to his Newhaven allotment. She’s hungry for good stories, which she realises may never come again, and Love’s murder seems like the last chance saloon for her.

Its vivid sense of location is one of this engaging mystery’s great strengths, and some of the colourful supporting characters, like Sandison’s police contact Detective Reculver, a large, one-eyed man frequently seen in make-up for some reason, and the quirkily confident arts administrator Theseus Campbell, hint at a larger world outside the narrative. Sandison in particular is a character worth exploring in greater depth, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Miller was far from done with her yet.