IN the popular imagination, Glasgow is a city of fists. Even the “first buds of spring” are described as “small green fists” in William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw. Behind the human knuckles are hard, corrupt men who drink whisky, carry rolls of cash in their back pockets and, if they are really good at punching, rule the roost, from litter picker to provost.
Wherever there are gangsters there are saps who want to be part of the gang. In Denise Mina’s The Long Drop, the Glaswegian businessman William Watt “likes being near powerful respectable people”. Peter Manuel, the other protagonist, has the “rough-hewn good looks of Robert Mitchum”. If you want the part you have to look it.
This smoky boozy novel follows these two pitiable but cruel men – both as tough as melted camembert – during one dark night of the soul in December 1957 and during Manuel’s trial in 1958.
The Long Drop is not true crime, but there’s a lot of truth in it. Manuel was a serial killer. He was the third-last person hanged in Scotland. Among the abominable acts he was convicted of were the murder of businessman William Watt’s wife, sister-in-law and daughter. During his trial he did sack his counsel and conduct his own defence. He also did have a meeting with Watt where they spent the night frequenting the city’s seedier establishments.
It is commonplace for books like Mina’s to be described as gap-fillers for those missing parts of history. But that gives novels a subordinate status. Mina, right, doesn’t fill in the gaps, she carefully steals from the most intriguing parts of history and creates a – forgive the pun – finely executed thriller.
As we move through the city we discover that Manuel and Watt are merely two sad and lonely pawns in a much larger game of chess. And the people controlling the pieces have invented their own rules. They are smart-talking and sharp-suited. Behind the façade, however, they are grubby little men with grubby little motives.
Manuel is driven by a similar grubbiness. He is a failed writer and, as such, a haphazard manipulator. His killings are acts of ill-planned brutality. In showing him for who he is, Mina undermines the popular image of the serial killer as sadistic genius and shows us the banality of violence. Manuel’s attempts to talk his way out of a guilty verdict demonstrate how the construction of a story can mean the difference between life and death.
Lawrence Dowdall, William Watt’s defence attorney, is a “master storyteller”. He is called into court to tell of how Watt and Manuel came to meet, and he knows he can find “the right trajectory to pin this tale to” and that “it’s the jury’s job to write the ending…Dowdall knows how the jury will want this story to go. He knows a story has more power if they feel they are choosing that ending themselves.”
Mina’s own storytelling has been impressive over the years, from her first trilogy, set in Garnethill, to her later Alex Morrow books. In The Long Drop she cleverly switches between two kinds of bars, one more sober than the other. But what stands out here is that her style has sharpened.
Written in the present tense, the prose is snappy and clipped. The story whizzes along, which is apposite. Time has a tendency to speed up with each whisky downed.
Despite this, Glasgow emerges as a character itself. It lingers on every page, veiled in a thick corrupt smog.
The image of Glasgow as shadier than a cave is fast becoming an annoying way for lazy writers to stay behind the times. Mina avoids this trap. Her city is a hall of mirrors, part reflection and part distortion.
The Long Drop is about how the stories we tell ourselves frame our perceptions of a people and a place. Near the end, while the echoes of the gavel are fading, we understand that we are reading a story about what we want to believe.
The news of Manuel’s death sentence “sweeps up the smoke-choked valleys of the Saltmarket, on up the High Street to the cathedral grounds and the Necropolis. It billows into shops and stations, around the looming black buildings of the begrimed city…one hour before late-edition newspapers are dry from the presses everyone in Glasgow already knows they’ll hang him in a month and they celebrate, because then their troubles will be over”.
The Long Drop by Denise Mina is published by Harvill Secker, priced £12.99
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