It’s always good to catch up with Howard Linskey over a couple of beers. If you haven’t read any of his books, I suggest you give them ‘a coat of looking at.’

I was on a panel on the Sunday morning with Alan Parks, Paul Heatley and Nigel Bird. I am already reading Alan’s first novel, Bloody January, which is great Tartan Noir, set in 1970s Glasgow.

Dark Tides Series Update

The body count is mounting in Sam and Ed’s fourth outing which is due for publication in the summer of 2019, but why does Sam have to go it alone in the second part of the book? What’s happened to Ed? 

In the meantime, let’s revisit the past: not only was the Internet years away, but in 1983 the ‘all bells and whistles’ of free-standing Rank Xerox photocopying machines were just making their way into police stations.

Can Ed really take advantage of a photocopier? 

Read the latest short story to find out.

Night Skies and Lie Detectors

November 1983

‘How is it that every time we do a job, that bastard Whelan knows about it?’ 

Alan Starrs was sat on the grey velour settee in the small, square living room of Jenny Andrews’ council house.

‘You tell me,’ Gary Moon said, knees under his chin, his gangly frame too big for the upturned red, milk bottle crate he was perched on. ‘Somebody’s grassing. How did he get those lawnmowers back?’

Starrs leaned forward, picked up the packet of ‘Old Holborn’ rolling tobacco from the floor, took out a Rizla paper, and looked at Moon.

‘The bloody shop hadn’t even opened,’ Moon said. ‘How did he know they’d been stolen? The bloke in the shop wouldn’t have known they’d been stolen when Whelan got them back.’

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I’m delighted to welcome Stephen Scarcliffe to my blog following the launch of his book ‘Pure Angst’

I’m sure you’ll agree that Stephen’s answers to my question are very insightful.

Do you remember the first book you read?

Roald Dahl the BFG. 

What is your ideal place to read and do you have a favourite time of day to read?

My ideal place to read is sitting on a beach in a sunbaked country, with a beer by my side and the sound of the waves lapping at the shore relaxing me. Favourite time would probably be last thing at night or first thing in the morning.

Which authors have inspired or influenced you?

The obvious one is Irvine Welsh. Pure Angst is set in a similar world and time frame to books such as Trainspotting. I likewise grew up in the north side of Edinburgh and likely moved in similar circles, with plenty of experience of Edinburgh’s underworld. My story is also told from multiple points of view, steeped in the drug trade and working class. Pure Angst is told more from the point of view of the guys at the top of the chain in organized crime rather than the addicts (with crossovers of course). There are more Begbies in my story than there are Spuds and sick boys.

Amongst other authors who have inspired me are Don Winslow, a crime-fiction author famed for his depiction of the drug wars and Mexican cartels. I took from him the fast pacing of chapters and keeping the suspense cranked up. 

Reading Charles Bukowski taught me to keep things simple and to the point when required. That sometimes less is more, creating a harder impact.

What led you to write your first book?

It all stemmed from a short story I wrote as part of a Creative writing module way back in 2005. It was about a heroin-addicted former gangster coming out of jail after a long stretch and trying with difficulty to reclaim his patch. I got really good feedback from family, friends and my college tutor, but it wasn’t until by chance I bumped into Irvine Welsh in a pub in Edinburgh city-centre with a copy of the short story on me that the seed was firmly planted. After a few pints, I built up the courage to go over and have a word. I handed him the copy and received an email shortly after detailing how much he enjoyed it. This inspired me to create a novel.

Was there a break through moment for you, or a key person who helped you?

The previous instance was a definite breakthrough moment. A key person who helped me would be Claire Wingfield my editor and literary consultant. She helped me understand that what I had coming in at a massive 400.000 words was far too big for one novel and instead I should split it into a series of books. She also helped me massively with my writing. Things, like tightening the point of view, showing not telling, and leaving more to the imagination, were absolutely vital to helping me become a far better writer.   

Thanks Stephen and good look with your new book.

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I was honoured when elainesreviews chose Be My Girl as her first book of the year to review.

Elaine, who lives in Dublin, has set herself a reading target of 120 books this year! Her reviews are honest, her own and very informative. Follow her on Instagram – you wont be disappointed.

To everybody who has emailed me via this website – it has been a pleasure responding.

And to you, the readers, I thank you all: books without readers are just words on a page.

Monkey and the Miners 

July 1984

Ed Whelan gazed through the windows at the police vans lined up outside, men boarding with heavy bags, another cheerful squad off for a week to earn a fortune in overtime in the heat of a strike-riven mining community.

Funny how the same cops who feigned sickness and injury for years, not fit enough to go on the streets, made miraculous recoveries when they smelled money. Being office-bound on light duties wouldn’t pay for the new conservatories, extensions and hotspot holidays everybody working the strike seemed to be buying. 

Ed shook his head as the sick, lame and lazy mingled easily with their hardworking fellow officers, the beer bellies intact but the limps and bent backs suddenly gone, permanent frowns and down-turned mouths replaced with smiles and laughter. An army of physiotherapists, chiropractors and psychiatrists could never have conjured up such miracles. 

‘Jesus would have struggled,’ Ed muttered under his breath, swallowing a mix of embarrassment and anger. ‘Chasing the pennies like kids at the bride’s car hoy-out.’

Margaret Thatcher, determined to smash the National Union of Miners and their leader Arthur Scargill, knew she needed the police onside.  Cops were drafted in from all over the country and sent to pitheads boiling with bitterness and hate, their overtime cheques a price Thatcher was happy to pay. Plenty had never seen a colliery in their lives; could never grasp the depth of feeling that was firing the conflict. 

The aggression was never likely to stay in the shadows, the attitude of officers bussed in from the south with alien accents and a cloth-cap-and-whippets view of the north leaving anti-police scars that would last for decades.

Ed had moved to the CID three years earlier, a young officer renowned as a thief-taker. He had been given the opportunity of digging out his uniform and climbing aboard the picket duty gravy train but politely declined.  Ed was too interested in progressing his career as a detective, or at least that was the official reason. There was another more personal one Ed had kept to himself. 

His mother’s family had been miners, not far from where he was standing by the office window; generations of his ancestors working in one of the many collieries like Blackhall, Horden and Seaham that breathed life along the north east coast.

Ed felt a connection. He didn’t want to make a fortune out of other people’s misery, raking in cash when families in those mining communities were living hand-to-mouth, barely surviving on food gathered in community centres and distributed by wives whose gallows humour was a thin whitewash on their suffering. The lucky ones had a husband or son playing 1^stteam rugby for affluent clubs in smart nearby towns where the bleak reality of the strike was kept to television screens and newspaper headlines. Those men were given free beer on match days and food parcels to take home. 

Ed had no desire to be a political pawn. Two weeks earlier, the worst violence of the strike had broken out at what the tabloids had branded the Battle of Orgreave.  The scenes had been shocking. He was pleased he hadn’t fought with miners. Ed wasn’t a coward. He just happened to agree with their stance. 

And besides, crime didn’t stop just because a strike was tearing the country apart.

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“The past is a different country: they do things differently there.”
L.P. Hartley

That was certainly true when I joined the CID in 1981: a time before mobile phones, TV on demand and satellite dishes. A time when pubs were governed by licensing laws dating back to the First World War, shops kept their doors locked on Sunday and the Starship Enterprise landing in your back garden was more likely than a sci-fi writer dreaming up something even remotely resembling the Internet. 

It was a time before the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, taped interviews and risk assessments; the forerunner to batons, Tasers and CS gas was a wooden truncheon.

Police officers wore tunics, helmets and creased trousers, before the era of NATO style sweaters, flat caps and combat pants.

D/Sergeant Ed Whelan, still featuring in my novels with DCI Sam Parker, was a young detective then. (He’d be retired now had he not left the force for ten years and then re-joined.) 

Every two months I will publish a free short story featuring Ed at the beginning of his CID career. Was it really ‘Life on Mars’?

Journey into that foreign country and read about life in a 1980s CID office.

Things were certainly different.

Santa’s XR3i

Chris Waddle sat in a corner of the Blue Parrot sipping his pint.

‘Kid Clayton and two of his mates are going to do a ram-raid on that leather shop in the town centre tomorrow night.’

All of Detective Constable Ed Whelan’s informants went by the names of his sporting heroes and to Ed, Waddle was a Newcastle United legend, the local boy made majestic, an unlikely shambling god risen from the factory floor to St James Park quicker than he could fill a skin with sausage meat. 

‘Time?’

‘Don’t know,’ Waddle told him, rubbing a nail-bitten hand over his bum-fluff covered chin. ‘But after the nightclubs shut.’

All the randy new couples full of fumbling lust and the jealous losers whose patter or nerve had failed them would be thrown out at 2am, Ed knew. So do the job around three in all probability. Best time to commit burglaries, between 3 and 4am, when the law-abiding were in a deep sleep.

‘Who’s he doing it with?’

‘Dunno.’

‘How many then?

‘I just told you. Two.’

Ed took a taste of his Cameron’s Strongarm, one of his favourites. ‘Car?’

‘He stole one the other night,’ Waddle said. ‘It’s in a garage somewhere. White XR3i.’

Ed nodded. He remembered reading about the theft on the night report. Somebody’s pride and joy, less than a year old and a high performance engine that would leave a police Panda car gasping in its slipstream, the ram-raider’s motor of choice.  The owner had done his best, but the Krooklock had been no deterrent to a determined thief. 

‘Has he asked you on the job?’ Ed watched Waddle work on his drink.

‘Yeah, but you said I couldn’t go on any.’

Ed leaned across the table and pushed away Waddle’s ashtray, still leaking smoke and overflowing with cigarette ends

‘Not strictly true,’ he told him. ‘I said you only had to play a minor part.’

Ed looked at him, his voice quiet but threatening. ‘You haven’t set this up have you?’

‘Fucking sure I haven’t,’ Waddle’s nervous eyes darted away from Ed.

It wouldn’t be the first time an informant planned a job, got others to pull it off, and then grassed them up to the CID. Ed was always suspicious when the tip off came from non-participants who had been privy to the planning.

He shuffled backwards on his stool, picked up his pint, and let his veiled threat settle into Waddle’s mind. ‘Where’s the gear going to afterwards?’

‘Kid’s house. He won’t trust anybody else with it.’

Ed nodded, took two huge mouthfuls of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘And the car?’

‘They’ll unload it and then torch it.’

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In fairness I don’t, but it is Ian Serraillier’s ‘The Silver Sword’ that sticks in my mind; a book that introduced me to the horrors of World War Two via fiction and how people, including children, could be hunted by an occupying army.

My father bought me a paperback copy when I was about 9 years old and I devoured it – Warsaw and war torn Europe was a million miles from anything I’d experienced.

It instilled in me at that early age how circumstances can make individuals weak and vulnerable, and that still resonates with me today.

Did it have any bearing on me joining the police? Probably not, but I’ve always felt a strong sense of right and wrong.

And in case you don’t know, the silver sword is a paper knife.

 Ideal place/time to read?

In bed at night, that time before one-day ends and another begins. Since I was a child I always found that was the best time to immerse myself in a book.

In the middle of a murder investigation I would read at night to try and switch off, but it would be a biography or something light hearted as opposed to crime fiction.

Other than that, whenever I get the chance: on the beach, on an airplane, on a train. I tend to only watch sport on TV so I get plenty of opportunity.

I never read in public unless I’m on a sunbed or travelling; I’m too busy watching what’s going on, or talking to the bar staff.

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