Glasgow Noir Fiction

Vinnie McCutcheon’s head was found in an oil-drum, which was unlucky. Not for Vinnie, as such, since he was dead already, but for whoever killed him.

You have to think that a head lodged at the bottom of an oil-drum filled with the dogged garbage of everyday life would never turn up, especially at an unlicensed dump by a woodland edge in the Campsie Fells, never cleared and never attended, festered three feet deep with the sludge of rotting sanitary matter, pallets, cardboard, plastic ginger bottles, shapeless mystery fragments, batteries, bloated slugs and discarded rubber flowers of love.

But, turn up, Vinnie did. A traveller family, stopping by, thought they would improve the area by upending the drum to inspect its contents and – hey-ho – Vinnie rolled out to say hello, ten miles from home and winking with his less perky eye. Bad luck, Vinnie-killer – you could never have thought it would come to this.

Mired in the world of errant wives, missing persons fleeing mundane bills, businesses pursuing dishonest staff and petty personal transgressions, Stevie McCabe is suddenly asked to investigate the affairs of a local Labour MP.

Although he knows his client is lying, the commission gets his attention, especially because his unrequited lust for the owner of a jazz club has somehow turned into an asylum appeal for one of her singers and most especially because an old friend he can barely remember is asking him for a pro-bono investigation of the lurid death of his junkie brother.

Through the peeling tower blocks and smart sandstone tenements of the city, from university to squalid bed and breakfast hotels, McCabe pursues the trails of the dead junkie and the questionable MP, knowing that they should be unconnected, yet knowing, too, that the strict limits of coincidence are being bent and broken by the ways in which the stories intertwine.

A Stevie McCabe novel.

Here I am, lying in a spreading crescent of blood.

Not mine. At least, I don’t think most of the blood is mine……well, some of it must be, I know that somewhere at the back of my mind. Some of it.

But the stain that is inching across the mockingly clean and polished floor belongs to the woman I’m holding in my arms, slumping and lifeless now, the carmine pulse running from her and pooling like mercury.

So much blood, so much.

We lie on the ground together, crumpled in a tangle of limbs, exhausted now that there are no steps left in our dance of blood.

And so it ends as it began.

As it always had to.

Death on death, blood on blood.

It’s a clusterfuck….. a missing woman, an earl, who also happens to be a Catholic bishop, with his young male companion facing the threat of a murder charge. The missing woman was his girlfriend, and also the daughter of a senior police officer, and the copper himself is out of control. And Stevie McCabe is in the middle of it.

McCabe quickly discovers that more – many more – women have been disappearing and he embarks on a harrowing journey through the far reaches of the night, travelling deep into the dark heart of the city, where there are no easy answers and definitely no happy endings.

Tangling in the darkness with demons, real and imagined, McCabe wrestles with fate and redemption in places where he seems to be the only honest man left, but doubting even that. Prostitutes, the men who prey on them, gangsters, police, junkies and priests all leave their mark on McCabe as he faces the truth about the city and its victims, finding echoes in his own past everywhere he turns.

A case from Stevie McCabe’s past, a world where mobile phones were a luxury and politics were changing in ways that nobody could control. Engaged by a sacked civil servant and his unlikely Asian-American partner, a simple – dull, even – case of unfair dismissal escalates when the former Soviet secret police become involved.

But, nothing – including the KGB – is as it seems, which McCabe learns as he uncovers quasi-official conspiracies, false trails leading overseas, the disappearance of huge sums of government money and the strange marital arrangements of the woman who smokes for Scotland.

And why is an organisation that acts as a front for the provisional IRA taking such an interest in McCabe’s business? And then there’s he fact that he’s wanted for murder……

Truly, the more he hears, the less he knows.

What is your life worth if you’re nobody famous? What would you give to be somebody…anybody?

Britain’s most sensational TV show is under attack from a fanatical religious cult and Stevie McCabe is in a desperate race to discover what the sect is planning, while tracing a stalker whose threatening internet videos are increasingly disturbed.

Working for a TV company that’s rigging the results of the show, his investigation is dogged by lies, envy and obsession, and the insatiable lust for fame at any cost infects everything.

At the heart of the case – a charismatic young woman who embodies the spirit of Marilyn Monroe, a devious fantasist inventing new identities, the sleaziest tabloid reporter on the planet and an ex-magician planning his greatest trick – to fill his pockets with millions.

As always, the city of Glasgow provides a vivid backdrop for acts of mayhem, corruption and homicidal intent, in a landscape peopled by crooked police, gay brides, dying philosophers, spiritual gurus, teenage thugs and the missing.

My Name Is Never Was, the fourth Stevie McCabe novel from Glasgow Noir Fiction.

Glasgow’s Southside is scorching in unaccustomed heat and the neighbourhood teeters on the edge, simmering and riot-ready.

In the city’s docklands, a taxi driver murders his family in a bloody daylight massacre.

A bitter dispute between a union and a politically-connected business family escalates into firebomb attacks and violence.

Meanwhile, racist gangs organise violent confrontation after a white girl is raped and a Muslim woman attacked with acid in apparent retaliation…police and politicians struggle to prevent the tension turning into war on the streets.

And Stevie McCabe isn’t a player in any of this. He’s four hundred miles away, in London, planning to work for a bank, bird-watching and learning how to play Go.

He’s four hundred miles away…for now.

My brother Johnny lives in Florida. He wants to keep it that way. To keep living, that is – the Florida part is negotiable.

What does family mean? Everything? Nothing?

Private detective Stevie McCabe finds himself 5000 miles from home answering a distress call, deserting the hard streets of Glasgow for the seductive palms of Florida’s Gulf coast.

Brother Johnny is in trouble with the law, guilty of theft and fraud through a corrupt pyramid scheme, left to face the consequences by a partner who crashed his Cessna into a swamp, but that’s not Johnny’s biggest problem…his problem is that he laundered funds through the venture for a druglord, a high-value target for police.

So: face the penitentiary for his financial crimes…or plea bargain for deportation by incriminating the gangster at the risk of his own life?

But it’s not just family loyalty that drives Stevie McCabe, because some of his brother’s fraud victims were organised crime figures from back home in Glasgow – and he “helpfully” mentioned Stevie’s name while doing it: both brothers are now threatened equally by law and disorder in two countries as cultures blend and clash in a melee where there are no victories, only flavors of defeat.

…and a hurricane is raging across the Gulf towards Florida, threatening to blow everybody’s plans away…

The Doune family were old money, so old they had a motto and a coat of arms. But that didn’t stop Lachlan Doune becoming a child killer twenty years ago, while still a child himself.

Stevie McCabe knows nothing of why Lachlan, released from psychiatric care after a long incarceration, calls for his services, and has no chance to find out before the client is found hanging from a rowan tree outside the family mansion, his alcoholic sister too wasted to notice.

When Lachlan’s will is read, the shocking revelation is that his millions have been left to the mother of the child he killed decades before…but that bequest is worth nothing, because the fortune has already been stolen.

McCabe, facing his own issues of family and relationships, begins to wade through the bleak, tortured history of a clan weighted down by decades of murder, wealth, suicide, infidelity and violence.

Truth is illusory and nothing stays the same for long in their dark world of lies and fear.

The veteran detective plunges into a world where money and privilege is overlaid on Glasgow’s tapestry of drugs and crime, a convergence that breeds creatures breathing squalid life and miserable death over everything they touch. Can McCabe discover a seam of truth running through the mother lode of decay?