Liam McIlvanney (2019) The Quaker.

Liam McIlvanney has writing in his blood. William McIlvanney, of course, is recognised as the godfather of Scottish noir fiction. When Liam McIlvanney won The Bloody Scotland, Scottish Crime Book of the Year—which used to be named after William McIlvanney—with The Quaker, you’d get the impression it was an inside job.

A bit like Stephen King’s son, who’s also a writer, winning some big award for horror fiction.

I picked up and put down The Quaker a few times.  I got it. Police procedural. The Quaker was actually Bible John.

It was there in the Prologue.

‘That winter, posters of a smart, fair-haired young man smirked out from bus stops and newsagents’ doors across the city. The same face looked down from the corkboards of doctors’ waiting rooms and the glass display cases in public libraries.’

A shift towards the end of the Prologue to those leading the chase for the serial killer of three young women who’d been picked up at the dancing in Barrowland and their bodies dumped in plain view across the city.

But now the case has stalled. More and more money poured into it. No results. The public want answers. The Daily Record and other media rags’ tone has changed. Broadly supportive to a man—and it was all men then—now they’re mocking the men in charge, George Cochrane with his mackintosh, trilby and pipe and Chief Constable Arthur Lennox.

DI Duncan McCormack has been seconded from the Flying Squad and sent into the Murder Room to write a damning report on how the case has been mismanaged so the bigwigs can scale down the operation on the pretext of efficiency. Chances missed. All that palaver.

Everyone knows why he’s there. Guys who have been working the case for six months to a year, give him a wide berth. He’s a management grass. His operational boss, George Cochrane, plays the game. He’s ready for retirement. Gives McCormack a partner, Goldie, to work with on a team that’s not a team.

 The novel’s three fictional victims—Jacquilyn Keevins, Ann Ogilvie, and Marion Mercer—mirror the real victims. They fooled me. I remembered Marion Mercer because her body was just found up the road from me. Tenements and back courts in Earl Court are broadly the same. She was married and going to the dancing. From documentary sources you can hear Helen Puttock’s husband (the fictional Marion Mercer) saying he shouldn’t have let her go out. That’s also how men talked and thought in those days. Women, especially married women, were property. Kept in or sent out. Bible John murdered real women and quoted the scripture when talking to them.

McIlvanney gives his fictional women a voice.  Jacquilyn Keevins, Ann Ogilvie, and Marion Mercer get to tell their story from their point of view. What happened that night? How they came to meet The Quaker. How they had to keep that they knew him already a dirty secret.   

None of them suspected they were dancing with the devil. They’d heard about Bible John/The Quaker, of course, but these things happened to other women.

One witness to what Bible John/ The Quaker looked like was so pissed she couldn’t even remember the colour of her hair, never mind his, after they dropped her off on a taxi first. Went to Earl Street.  Murdered.

McCormack’s job would be made much simpler if the Murder Squad detectives could simply find The Quaker.

Alex Paton is a peterman. He’s travelling back to his Maryhill roots to look at a job. Blow a safe, in and out. Glasgow has been gutted. Factories and shipyards closed. Tenements ripped down. High rises thrown up in far flung estates. But the same old shit. An Arthur Thompson type running the rackets and wanting a share of jobs done on his manor. Paton doesn’t get that kind of grief in London.

The reader knows Bible John was never caught. A cold case with the wrong man fitted up. Liam McIlvanney brings it to life. Makes it believable and almost true. Read on.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6