337 Pages
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When a teenage boy shoots a young woman dead in the middle of a busy Glasgow street and then commits suicide, Detective Harry McCoy is sure of one thing. It wasn't a random act of violence.
With his new partner in tow, McCoy uses his underworld network to lead the investigation but soon runs up against a secret society led by Glasgow's wealthiest family, the Dunlops.
McCoy's boss doesn't want him to investigate. The Dunlops seem untouchable. But McCoy has other ideas . . .
In a helter-skelter tale – winding from moneyed elite to hipster music groupies to the brutal gangs of the urban wasteland – Bloody January brings to life the dark underbelly of 1970s Glasgow and introduces a dark and electrifying new voice in Scottish noir.
I selected this book after seeing Alan Parks on the Scottish Bookclub TV show and thinking what a character. Would like to have a few pints with the rough and ready raconteur.
Bloody January is a grim and gritty police thriller set in the urban wastelands of Glasgow in the 1970s. Think of a cross between Get Carter and Tagget.
The prose is pared down and straight forward as befits both the tale and the background of the unforgiving and unloving city. Hard boiled just doesn't cover it.
The gangsters rob, cheat, steal beat people up, and so do the Police. The only difference is the Police they lie about it. The gangsters and police know each other well and are in a symbiotic relationship. Especially our prostitute visiting, drug taking protagonist Harry McCoy. His best mate is Stevie Collins the biggest wrong un in Glasgow. Is Harry mining Stevie for information or has Stevie got Harry in his pocket?
The writer does a good job of evoking the squalor and toughness of life in early 1970s Glasgow in both the human characters and the character of the city itself.
Then as now, and probably forever, the rich are the most corrupt of all but never seem to suffer any consequences for their actions. Harry rails against this and decides that just this one time that is not going happen. They wont get away with it. He knows he has a huge battle on his hands battling the underworld and his bosses and that's before he can confront the immensely wealthy and powerful Dunlop family.
Enjoyable gritty 70s period police novel.
He only had two speeds, Murray. Shouting, which meant he was annoyed, and talking quietly, which meant he was about to get annoyed.bookshops, pubs full of hairy students and lecturers talking about Marxism and the struggle of the working classes. Might have talked more sense if they’d ever met a member of the working classes, but that wasn’t going to happen up here. They couldn’t afford the price of the drink.
The internal walls of the factory had been knocked down, making a room the size of a couple of tennis courts. There were wee fires burning, groups of people round them, couple of dogs wandering about. He heard laughing behind him, turned as a woman emerged from the darkness. She was nude, fat body pale in the flickering light. She was wiping a towel between her legs with one hand, swigging cider from a bottle with the other. She approached the line of elderly men ranged along the back wall, nodded at one and he got up and followed her back into the darkness.
He made a run for it, got in the unmarked Viva and slammed the door. He started the engine up and the radio came on. ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ suddenly filling the steamed- up car. He swore, turned the dial, Rod Stewart, ‘Maggie May’. Much better.
First thing I remember is zooming round our concrete back yard on my plastic trike then a bluebottle landed on my arm. Cue hysteria. Things continued much in this vein for a good few years.I went to The University of Glasgow and studied Moral Philosophy. Unsurprisingly I remember very little of it. After that I was unemployed for a year or so and watched the entire contents of our local video shop. Two films a day for two pounds.
Then I started working in a music management company for a while.I wasn’t very good at it. Then I was asked to go and work at London Records which I did. There I commissioned music videos and artwork and photography. Then London sort of became Warners and I did the same thing there. I worked with some very good artists. New Order. The Streets. All Saints. Enya.
I started writing a book about social housing in post-war Glasgow which somehow became a crime novel set in 1973. That was Bloody January. I put it in a drawer for a while and went off to shoot cast interviews and b-roll on a film called Che directed by Steven Soderberg. I wasn’t very good at that either but it meant I went to Mexico and Spain and Cuba.
When I came back my friend John Niven, now a successful novelist and no longer a partner in crime at London Records, suggested I wrote a novel. I told him I had and I gave him Bloody January. He gave it to his agent who didn’t like it. That was the end of that I thought but he gave it to his friend Sarah Pinborough who liked it and gave it to another agent who also liked it. They suggested I go and see Canongate. I liked them and they liked me so I signed a deal.
Bloody January got published and did quite well so I wrote February’s Son and then Bobby March Will Live Forever. They also got published in various other countries translated into things like Blutiger Januar and Il Figlio Di Febbraio.
I also write things for TV and film, none of which ever seem to get made. So I now spend most of my time thinking up various horrible scenarios in the early seventies. I also walk a lot. That is the story of my life.
(from alanparks.co.uk)
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