May God Forgive - Alan Parks
It seems like business as usual then as far as crime and death is concerned in the city at the start of May God Forgive. Glasgow in 1974, as we have come to see pretty comprehensively in the four previous gritty police detective Harry McCoy novels, is a rough place filled with violent crime fuelled by alcohol, drugs and the gangs who control different districts of the city. Police detective McCoy himself has been a victim of the city's problems and it's taking its toll. Not quite fit to return to duty, it doesn't take long for events to push him back into a spiral of drinking and drug use. It might be the fact that he can personally relate to the impact of the problems in the city however that drive his determination to do what he can to put some things right when no one else seems to care.
It's hard for McCoy not to notice that the police have their hands full with the latest victims of crime in the city. Everyone has been shocked by the burning down of Dolly's hairdressing salon in Royston, a tough area of the city, that has resulted in the deaths of three innocent women and two children. People are angry and out on the streets demanding retribution against the three suspects who have been handed over to the police following an anonymous tip off. They are even more angry when the police wagon transporting them through a mob of people ready to lynch them is attacked by an unknown vehicle and the three young suspects are taken out of the hands of the police.
Elsewhere McCoy looks into another death, a suspected suicide from a homeless shelter. Such things are not uncommon in Models like the Great Northern, which house many at the end of their tether, but McCoy is surprised that he knows the victim. Dirty Ally - who I think we came across before in The April Dead - is well-known as a fixer for pornographers and pimps, running a dubious stall selling scud mags at Paddy's Market. It's unlikely that he would be living in such a place and it turns out that he had been threatened and was possibly hiding out from someone. Despite Harry's colleague Wattie's refusal to run round half of Glasgow for a couple of weeks trying to find a reason for the suspicious death of a low-life - he has the body of an unidentified young woman to investigate - we know that's exactly what McCoy will do. No one else would bother for a character like Dirty Ally.
Personal motivation is a good reason for investigating when others won't and Parks has developed in McCoy a complex character with an intriguing and sometimes horrifying personal background. That is what pushes him to delve into matters that go against every fibre of his being, offending not just his sensibility but his weak ulcer-ridden stomach. The gangland rivalry seems to be heating up in May God Forgive and it does lead to some stomach churning violence, but Parks isn't that predictable. It's all too easy to not look any further than the actions of some brutal hardmen fighting it out between each other, when in fact there are clearly other factors at play and potentially some respectable people involved.
This is fierce and fearless writing. Parks in this series is exploring the roots of crime not in those easy traditional areas of the lower classes and gangland crime, but recognising rather that those who appear most dangerous are actually in some ways the weak ones - the weakness of coming from an impoverished background - exploited by those with real power and influence hiding behind a veneer of respectability. So it's not by chance then that the gang lords are not fighting a bloody turf war for supremacy as much as seeking to attain an equal measure of respectability in the eyes of society. That however is much harder to achieve.
It doesn't take much imagination then to make a leap and see how that is still relevant to the present day, but it's all the more powerful for how Parks digs deep into the history of Glasgow and into the background of Harry McCoy, to understand how it all fits together. Whether you come to May God Forgive as the fifth Harry McCoy book or as a first-time standalone, what is clearly evident is the mechanics in place that make this an exceptional piece of crime fiction writing, drawing you in and letting you put the pieces together yourself to understand who the real victims are and how justice really operates. What is less clear is why this outstanding series has not been up for every crime fiction award going.
Reading notes: May God Forgive (A Harry McCoy Thriller Book 5) by Alan Parks is published by Canongate. Reviewed from NetGalley preview copy in eBook/Kindle format. Publication date is 28th April 2022.
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