Alan Parks' Harry McCoy series

I never do this!

“For a bit of excellent Tartan Noir”, said my Glaswegian pal, “try Alan Parks starting with Bloody January.” So, Paul’s recommendations being highly valued, I started with BLOODY JANUARY. A couple of weeks later, I had read all four of Park’s Harry McCoy novels back-to-back.

BLOODY JANUARY introduces Glasgow Detective Harry McCoy. It’s January 1973 and McCoy witnesses the murder of a young girl in Glasgow’s central bus station whose killer commits suicide before he can be apprehended. Investigating, McCoy finds links to a high-powered family, and to his own past. Part of that past is Stevie Cooper, a career criminal, pimp, drug dealer, and gang boss, whose stock is rising in the Glasgow underworld. Cooper is also Harry McCoy’s friend and sometime protector.

FEBRUARY’S SON finds McCoy investigating the death of a young Glasgow Celtic football star, murdered in grisly circumstances. McCoy uncovers links to a Glasgow crime family. Then the bodies start to pile up…

The third novel, BOBBY MARCH WILL LIVE FOREVER, jumps to August 1973 with Glasgow in the middle of a heatwave. A young girl has gone missing, a citywide manhunt in operation, but McCoy is shut out of the investigation run, as it is, by an old adversary in the force. Reduced to following up a series of small time bank robberies, McCoy also looks into the apparent overdose death of fading Glasgow rock star, Bobby March. This is possibly my favourite of the novels, with a fever-dream-like visit to ‘70s Belfast a highlight.

THE APRIL DEAD. April 1974. Bombs are going off in Glasgow but, despite the city sharing some of Northern Ireland’s sectarianism, this doesn’t feel like the IRA to Harry McCoy. Meanwhile, Harry is approached by the father of a US sailor who has gone missing from a nearby American naval base.

All four novels are well plotted mystery-thrillers, Alan Parks clearly knowing how to construct a story. But it is the characters and the setting, the atmosphere that sets these books apart. Parks’s Glasgow is a dark, bleak place populated by drug dealers, prostitutes, criminal gangs, the homeless, good and bad polis, police in the Glasgow vernacular. It feels authentic, as much a character in the stories as Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles or Lawrence Block’s New York. 

McCoy is not a dirty cop, or polis, but he is conflicted. He has a strong sense of morality, knows what is right and wrong, but the dividing line doesn’t always tally with where others, particularly other polis, would consider it to be. He has allies in his boss, Murray and his new partner, Wattie, but continually tests their support. He has a complicated relationship with Stevie Cooper, to whom he has a strong loyalty due to their shared past when Cooper protected the young McCoy, often suffering in his stead. But McCoy is not blind to Cooper’s sociopathic nature. In Cooper, we see echoes of Hawk in Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels or Mouse in Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins stories. Cooper is no sidekick, no gangster with a heart of gold. He is a genuinely dangerous man, one whom McCoy reluctantly allows to run, feeling perhaps that Cooper is a better alternative to his criminal rivals, but knowing that there will be a reckoning and that he will someday have to take Cooper down. The reader, and Harry McCoy, suspect that this may prove impossible.

This is simply one of the best continuing series out there at present and can stand with the best of any era. Think Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, William McIllvaney, Ian Rankin. Yes, all the standard elements are there and, in lesser hands, the books could be clichéd but they transcend the genre. Violently. Viscerally.

The only real problem is that, now that I have caught up, it’s going to be a long wait for the next in the series. I can’t wait for May, whenever that might be…