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WORK TITLE: Bloody January
WORK NOTES:
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NATIONALITY: Scottish
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1964.
EDUCATION:University of Glasgow, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Alan Parks is a Scottish writer. Born in Scotland, he studied at the University of Glasgow, where he earned a master’s degree in moral philosophy. Parks talked with Teddy Jamieson in an article in the Herald Scotland about playing music in a band. He admitted: “I’m too old, and there’s not enough money. I’m fifty-four, and when bands are young enough to be your children, it’s not a good look when you’re trying to tell them what to do. So now I tend to only do the weird ones, the odds and sods.” In the same article, Parks also discussed his views on writing in general. He recalled that writing is “the most unsociable thing. I live by myself. I sit at the kitchen table and work. So, I’ve started writing outside the house because it’s driving me nuts. I’ll sit at McDonald’s and do it there, do it on the bus or train. It’s a lonely pursuit.”
Parks published Bloody January in 2017. Set in Glasgow, in 1973, the story centers on Detective Harry McCoy as he explores the underbelly of the Scottish city. When McCoy gets a tip that a waitress named Lorna will be murdered the following day, he and his newbie partner, Wattie, attempt to find and protect her. At a bus station near her house, a teenager shoots Lorna in their presence and then kills himself while fleeing. The source of McCoy’s tip is later found dead after having his tongue cut out and his throat slit. Lorna’s roommate, Christine, offers some clues as to how she may have been involved in this trouble, where she earned a side income by dating some questionable individuals in the party scene. McCoy takes his investigation into the strip clubs of the city but also follows leads through the ranks of the Salvation Army as well. As more bodies are discovered, the evidence increasingly points to the involvement of the influential and affluent Dunlop family, complicating the investigation due to their numerous ties to other powerbrokers.
In an article in the Herald Scotland, Parks talked about his choice of Glasgow as the location for his debut novel. “I always think Glasgow gets represented as a bit one-dimensional in fiction. It all tends to be hard men and battered women, which, I’m sure, sadly, is a lot of people’s experience. But I always remember we used to go to Pettigrew’s and Frasers. Big department stores which seemed really rich. And Sir Hugh Fraser was always in the paper, someone who seemed glamorous in a way, and I thought there was more to Glasgow than people suffering under poverty.”
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews remarked that “Parks’ debut novel has an in-your-face immediacy that matches its protagonist.” The Kirkus Reviews contributor commented that “compelling portraits of minor characters tucked into several scenes add texture and interest.” A Publishers Weekly contributor stated: “A worthy addition to the tartan noir canon, McCoy is a flawed hero to watch, as is his creator.” In a review in the Scotsman, Allan Massie reasoned that “Bloody January is a good example of Tartan Noir, and much of it is enjoyable. But it’s also a first novel and has many of the faults characteristic of first novels, chief among them the author’s determination to cram too much in, to maintain a hectic pace, and allow the reader too few pauses. Moreover the dialogue, which is standard gritty crime novel talk, never sounds in the head.” Writing in the Wee Review Website, Clay Winowiecki pointed out that “the novel often brings in a complex mix of heavy emotions that the city is struggling through: religious tensions, a burgeoning heroin epidemic, unstoppable police corruption and violence as the only means of solving a problem.” In a review in the Skinny website, Heather McDaid lauded that “Bloody January is a startlingly excellent addition to the Scottish crime scene, even more so as a debut.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Herald Scotland, January 8, 2018, Teddy Jamieson, “Crime Writer Alan Parks on Wanting to Be the James Ellroy of Glasgow.”
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2018, review of Bloody January.
Publishers Weekly, January 29, 2018, review of Bloody January, p. 171.
Scotsman, January 17, 2018, Allan Massie, review of Bloody January.
ONLINE
Skinny, http://www.theskinny.co.uk/ (January 8, 2018), Heather McDaid, review of Bloody January.
Wee Review, http://theweereview.com/ (January 12, 2018), review of Bloody January.
Alan Parks was born in Scotland and attended The University of Glasgow where he was awarded a M.A. in Moral Philosophy. Bloody January is his debut novel.
Crime writer Alan Parks on wanting to be the James Ellroy of Glasgow
Teddy Jamieson
Senior Features Writer
Author Alan Parks in Glasgow. Photograph Jamie Simpson
ALAN Parks is an amiable bear of a man who these days spends his time wandering around Glasgow thinking up ways to murder people. No, don’t worry. His criminal activities are purely fictional. Parks is that not-so-rare thing these days, a Scottish crime writer.
His first novel Bloody January is out now. It is set in the city in which he lives and takes place over the course of a few weeks at the start of the year (the title might have given that away). The year in question is 1973.
This is crime fiction as time travel, then. Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep on the radio, The Magic Roundabout on the telly, feather cut hairstyles, pints in Sammy Dow’s and the Muscular Arms. All in the company of Parks’s fictional policeman, Detective Harry McCoy.
It starts, more or less, with a bang. Or a shooting in the Buchanan Street bus station at any rate. “I wanted to get the crime out of the way as quickly as possible,” Parks says when we meet in Glasgow’s city centre. “I’m terrible at whodunnits. I can’t think up these things. So, it’s more of a whydunnit.”
We are sitting in the Cup Tea Lounge in Renfield Street. It used to be De Quincy’s pub, he reminds me. He spent his 21st birthday here. He has thrown up in this very room, he says. Glasgow was his manor when he was younger. And after years in London it is again.
At 54 he has left it late to become an author. But then he had a perfectly good career in the music industry for the best part of 30 years, so we can maybe forgive him his tardiness. The question is why now?
It’s related to his return Glasgow, he says. Not that he ever totally left. He moved to London in the 1980s, but he always had ties to the city and four, five years ago (he’s a little vague on dates), he decided to move back.
When he did so he started taking night classes on the 20th-century history of the city. He found himself in parts of the city that he hadn’t visited since he was a child. Some of the Glasgow he knew was still there, but much had disappeared. It made him think that it was time for someone to write a history of 20th-century Glasgow.
And then he realised he wasn’t the right person to do that but maybe he could write a crime novel. And that’s what he’s done. It’s a very readable one too.
The Glasgow of Bloody January is the Glasgow of his childhood. Although he grew up in Paisley, his parents were from the city. “My mum was exiled in Paisley much to her horror.”
As a result, he was constantly getting dragged on the bus back to visit family. His great aunt lived on the 23rd floor in the high flats of Dobbies Loan. “It literally looked over the bus station,” he recalls. “It looked like a big toy set, watching these buses coming and going.”
The city, he remembers, was a dark place. Physically dark. He’d wait for the bus at the back of the St Enoch Hotel. “Down there you’d see a lot of homeless people and you’d see a lot of people dressed up to go out on the town. And so, it was a bit of an adventure to come here. I remember it as an exciting and frightening place.”
It is that fear and excitement he tries to tap into in Bloody January. “I always think Glasgow gets represented as a bit one-dimensional in fiction. It all tends to be hard men and battered women, which, I’m sure, sadly, is a lot of people’s experience. But I always remember we used to go to Pettigrew’s and Frasers. Big department stores which seemed really rich.
“And Sir Hugh Fraser was always in the paper, someone who seemed glamorous in a way, and I thought there was more to Glasgow than people suffering under poverty.”
These days Edinburgh is hoaching with fictional detectives. Glasgow a little less so. With the honourable exception of Alex Gray’s Detective Lorimer and Denise Mina’s Alex Morrow, Glasgow crime fiction is still dominated by the memories of Taggart and William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw novels.
Did the shadow of either weigh on him when he was writing Bloody January? “McIlvanney does because I really, really like those books. They’re more like modern European literature than hardboiled Glasgow.”
Comparisons with McIlvanney would terrify him, he says. “Mine isn’t anything near as good.” But he hopes, like McIlvanney, he is writing about a real place; that his Glasgow will be recognisable to those who lived through those times.
He even writes things that happened in the city in January 1973 into the book. And so, Harry McCoy gets to go backstage during a David Bowie gig at Green’s Playhouse. In the sequel currently being written and set a few weeks after Bloody January, Scotland play England at Hampden. England won 5-0, but he is including it because that’s what people in Glasgow would have been talking about.
If the books take off, he says, he’ll happily take McCoy through the 1970s. But not beyond 1980, he thinks. That’s not of interest to him. But then maybe that’s because by the 1980s his own life had gone in another direction.
When he was a student studying moral philosophy at Glasgow University Alan Parks met another student, called Lloyd. Lloyd was a wannabe musician. Another mutual friend, Derek, offered to manage Lloyd.
When Parks graduated he couldn’t get a job and sat at home watching videos all day. Lloyd, meanwhile, got himself a band and become a pop star. In 1984 Lloyd Cole and the Commotions became the sound of young Scotland (Lloyd came from Derbyshire, but never mind).
He and his manager were suddenly in demand and they needed someone to answer their office phone in Glasgow when they were in London. They thought of their mate Alan. And that’s how Parks’s musical career started.
After working for the Commotions management company, Parks became creative director at London Records in the 1990s, working with the likes of New Order and All Saints.
“I commissioned the artwork and the videos and the photography. Basically, you were trying to put the visual identity of the band together. And sometimes that came 100 per cent from the band and I facilitated it and sometimes they went: ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’”
He loved the job. And it was a time when visuals mattered. It was the age of The Face magazine and I-D magazine. “People cared about videos and record sleeves, so it was kind of a dream job, faffing around with bands all days on photoshoots.
Some bands he really liked. Others could be “an absolute pain in the arse,” he admits. Then again, he says, the record company would work them hard. “Pop bands literally have no time from when they get up until they go to bed.
“Especially if it’s girls. They get up at 4 o’clock in the morning to get their hair and make-up done. They were really ratty, but I’d be f****** ratty if I had to get up at 4 o’clock to go to Belgium every day.”
He saw the best days of the music industry. “There was a lot of money floating about, a lot of largesse.”
But with the arrival of Spotify and internet streaming the gravy train was about to come off the tracks.
“Oh God, yeah. You could see it coming. We got downsized about four times. We stopped replacing people. And it was stupidly overpaid, the music industry. It really was. There just wasn’t the money to sustain it and of course the first thing to go was the stuff I do.”
He wasn’t surprised when he was offered a redundancy.
“I still do bits and bobs but I’m too old and there’s not enough money. I’m 54 and when bands are young enough to be your children, it’s not a good look when you’re trying to tell them what to do. So now I tend to only do the weird ones, the odds and sods.”
The redundancy led him to spending more time in Glasgow again. And that’s when the idea of the book first came up. He wrote a lot of it on the train to and from London.
Now he’s 70,000 words into the second novel. “Writing’s the most unsociable thing. I live by myself. I sit at the kitchen table and work. So, I’ve started writing outside the house because it’s driving me nuts. I’ll sit at McDonald’s and do it there, do it on the bus or train. It’s a lonely pursuit.”
Maybe that’s why thoughts turn to crime. Alan Parks is an amiable bear of a man with murder on his mind. Lucky for us.
CAREER HIGH
I think working on The Streets’ first album. It was a huge commercial and critical success. He was great, the visuals worked, and the music was great. It was a good thing to be involved with. And a record that means something is very rare.
CAREER LOW
I shouldn’t say this … Chas and Dave. I was sure they would be amiable cockney chaps. One of them was really nice …
BEST ADVICE RECEIVED
Laurie Cokell was the boss of London Records. Everything there was a drama. It was just a constant level of stupid, unnecessary hysteria. He once said: ‘You know what? Sometimes don’t do anything. Just sit back and let things happen.’
FAVOURITE MUSIC
The Velvet Underground. I still listen to them, which, I suppose, is the main thing.
FAVOURITE WRITER
I like James Ellroy. His books are books about Los Angeles that happen to have crime in them. They’re the history of post-war Los Angeles. In my deluded state I thought: ‘I’ll try and do the same thing for Glasgow.’
IDEAL DINNER PARTY
I once went to dinner and Malcolm McLaren was there. This was not long after the Sex Pistols and I thought: ‘If he asks me what I do I’m going to have to kill myself.’ “I manage Lloyd Cole and the Commotions.” It’s not really the cutting edge of anarchy. And he asked and he was really gracious. So I’d like him. And Germaine Greer. She’d be interesting to listen to.
Bloody January, by Alan Parks, is published by Canongate, £12.99.
Parks, Alan: BLOODY JANUARY
Kirkus Reviews. (Jan. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Parks, Alan BLOODY JANUARY Europa Editions (Adult Fiction) $17.00 3, 20 ISBN: 978-1-60945-448-7
A gritty Glasgow detective enlists the dregs of the underworld in his one-man war against an untouchably wealthy family.
A punchy prologue recalls the month in 1973 when there were six murders in the city. The story opens on Jan. 1, when detective Harry McCoy, trolling the lowlife informants on his beat, gets a tip that a waitress named Lorna will be killed the next day. Taking his green new partner, Wattie, McCoy goes to the busy bus station closest to Lorna's restaurant but fails to save her from a frantic teenage hit man who shoots in McCoy's direction but hits Lorna instead. While fleeing, the young assassin shoots himself in the head. Lorna dies as well. So does Nairn, the thug who gave McCoy the tip, whose body is discovered with his throat slit and his tongue cut out. From that moment on, trouble seems to dog the two-fisted detective. Lorna's roommate, Christine, reveals that Lorna made extra money as a party girl, "dating" several suspicious characters. McCoy's probe grinds through Glasgow's tenderloin, from sleazy clubs to strip joints to a Salvation Army shelter. As more victims pile up, clues from their unseemly murders point incongruously to the highly respected Dunlops, an affluent and influential Glasgow family with deep investments in construction and factories. McCoy sees Wattie as a younger version of himself; the junior detective plays less like a sidekick than a conscience to his older partner.
Parks' debut novel has an in-your-face immediacy that matches its protagonist. Compelling portraits of minor characters tucked into several scenes add texture and interest.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Parks, Alan: BLOODY JANUARY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522643078/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7dd70dc2. Accessed 16 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522643078
Bloody January
Publishers Weekly. 265.5 (Jan. 29, 2018): p171.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Bloody January
Alan Parks. Europa, $17 trade paper (336p)
ISBN 978-1-60945-448-7
Det. Harry McCoy, the protagonist of Scottish author Parks's tautly woven first novel set in 1973, doesn't put much stock in information he gets from a criminal like Howie Nairn, but when Nairn--locked up in Glasgow's Barlinnie Prison--tells McCoy that a woman named Lorna is going to die the next day, the copper takes notice. The subsequent murder of 19-year-old waitress Lorna Skirving at a bus station by 17-year-old small-time thief Tommy Malone, immediately followed by Malone's suicide, sends McCoy on a hunt through the city's dankest slums and brothels all the way up to one of Glasgow's richest families, the Dunlops. McCoy's personal connection to the Dunlops--who are nearly untouchable when it comes to the police--makes him all the more determined to find a link between them and not only Lorna but also the other bodies that soon pile up. Stevie Cooper, McCoy's childhood friend who now makes less than savory business deals in the city, gives even the good guys a glossy sheen of blood and corruption. A worthy addition to the tartan noir canon, McCoy is a flawed hero to watch, as is his creator. Agent: Tom Witcomb, BlakeFriedmann (Mar.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bloody January." Publishers Weekly, 29 Jan. 2018, p. 171. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526116525/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2ebfab97. Accessed 16 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526116525
Book review: Bloody January, by Alan Parks Alan Parks Allan Massie Published: 11:01 Wednesday 17 January 2018 Share this article Sign Up To Our Daily Newsletter Sign up 0 Have your say Alan Parks’s first novel comes festooned with praise from a number of writers of Tartan Noir. This will understandably encourage many to buy it. John Niven, himself a bestselling novelist, says it’s “taut, violent and as close as you’ll get to 1970s Glasgow without a Tardis.” He adds that Parks is “a natural successor to William McIlvanney”. Well, every man to his own opinion. For my part I doubt if this novel takes you very close to 1970s Glasgow, except for some of the fine descriptions of the uncreative destruction resulting from the decision to carve motorways through the city. This is not because of the occasional mistake such as the assertion that homosexual acts were no longer against the law in 1973 – in England, yes, but Glasgow, like the rest of Scotland had to wait till 1980 for the law to be reformed. It is really because Parks’s Glasgow is identikit Tartan Noir Glasgow. Readers will find it agreeably familiar. The ingredients are standard: cops are foul-mouthed and drunken, some of them bent. The hero cop gets horribly beaten up, but recovers with extraordinary speed. There are lots of vice girls and madams, and of course their clients are judges, lawyers, politician, aristocrats etc. Ordinary Glaswegians, the kind who go to work everyday and are good family folk, don’t feature much. There are good scenes, the dialogue offers no disturbing surprises, and the plot rattles along with nice twists and turns from the first chapter, when a cop is summoned to Barlinnie by an inmate of the celebrated Special Unit who tells him that a girl called Lorna will be murdered tomorrow. So I’ve no doubt that fans of Tartan Noir will lap this one up. And why not? It’s a good and enjoyable example of the genre. But don’t let’s pretend that this novel and many like it are examples of true-to-life gritty realism. They are entertainments, and only the very best are more than that. They are no more true to real life than the classic English village detective novel with its locked rooms and nicely contrived plot used to be. That genre offered you murder as an agreeable puzzle to be solved; Tartan Noir, like the novels of the American hard-boiled school from which it derives, offers you murder as sensation, corruption as comfort. It is only the rare author who transcends the genre to remind us that at its best the crime novel can offer not merely entertainment but social and moral criticism.This is where Niven’s generous assertion that Parks is “a natural successor to William McIlvanney” rings false. There were hardmen in McIlvanney’s three Laidlaw novels, and they might give off a sense of menace; there was corruption too, but McIlvanney was interested in its effect on the corrupted. He wasn’t much interested in sensation, and not at all in violence as excitement. He was concerned with ethics, with, for example, how a policeman possessed of a certain power, should conduct himself. He addressed himself to crimes against the spirit as well as the body.It does a novelist no good (except perhaps commercially) to be over-praised. According to another puff this novel “sets Alan Parks in the same league as Ian Rankin and Louise Welsh”. Well, of course there is usually some distance between the top and bottom clubs in any league and Celtic and Partick Thistle are both in the Scottish Premiership. Bloody January is a good example of Tartan Noir, and much of it is enjoyable. But it’s also a first novel and has many of the faults characteristic of first novels, chief among them the author’s determination to cram too much in, to maintain a hectic pace, and allow the reader too few pauses. Moreover the dialogue, which is standard gritty crime novel talk, never sounds in the head. It’s monotonous, without individuality. Bloody January would have benefitted from some sharp editing, removing superfluous scenes, toning down others. The picture of Glasgow in the Seventies unquestionably owes more to television and other novels than it does to the reality of the city as it was then, but this very familiarity should guarantee the novel’s success. That said, it would be a surprise if Parks didn’t go on to write better ones. Bloody January, by Alan Parks, Canongate, 312pp, £12.99
Alan Parks – Bloody January
Sex, drugs, and gruesome violence in 1973 Glasgow are all in store for readers of the newest voice in Scottish crime fiction.
Reviews / Books / Fiction / Alan Parks – Bloody January Clay Winowiecki | 12 Jan 2018
Sex, drugs and gruesome violence in 1973 Glasgow are all in store for readers of the newest voice in Scottish crime fiction.
Alan Parks’ debut novel, Bloody January, is a sharply written Glaswegian crime novel with no wasted breath in his prose. Parks’ protagonist Detective Harry McCoy is unrelenting (outside of the occasional trip to the pub, of course) when he takes on a secret society run by Glasgow’s richest family while struggling against his own corrupt police force. McCoy’s tenacious demeanour compared to his obsequious colleagues often leads him into trouble with the most dangerous criminals the city has on offer.
Bloody January is complete with an exciting mix of characters each with their own individual aims that they will stop at nothing to achieve, resulting in hectic twists and turns that challenge McCoy.
Parks puts the reader on the most dangerous streets in Glasgow with ease through his fine attention to detail. Part of this comes from the author’s experience in another industry entirely. Having spent much of his life in the music sector, Parks expertly uses his love of music as a tool for making scenes feel all the more real and powerful, creating real suspense in the reader.
While this is a strong debut novel for Parks, it is not without fault in some respects. His fiction is sharply written but this can sometimes make the narrative feel rushed. As a result, some successes the main protagonist experiences can feel undeserved because not enough interaction has occurred between characters. Included in this is another issue – the dialogue can occasionally feel stretched and unrealistic.
The novel often brings in a complex mix of heavy emotions that the city is struggling through: religious tensions, a burgeoning heroin epidemic, unstoppable police corruption and violence as the only means of solving a problem. To help relieve the tension Parks sprinkles in much needed bits of humour, but more humour, even if it is dark humour, would be welcome.
Bloody January is the first publication by Alan Parks in the Harry McCoy crime series with a new publication expected annually. After an exciting debut, Parks will surely leave readers at the edge of their seat waiting for the sequel.
Bloody January by Alan Parks
From the moneyed elite to groupies, and the brutal gangs of an urban wasteland, Bloody January navigates the underbelly of 1970s Glasgow.
★★★★
Book Review by Heather McDaid | 08 Jan 2018
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Bloody January
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Book title: Bloody January
Author: Alan Parks
Trust the snitch. From the moneyed elite to groupies, and the brutal gangs of an urban wasteland, Bloody January promises a lot in navigating the underbelly of 1970s Glasgow. The moment Detective Harry McCoy fails to trust an unexpected tip-off, he’s set to traverse all of these murky waters as the body count continues to rise.
The new gnarly star of the Scottish Noir scene, McCoy fits the archetypal mould of the flawed protagonist. Shady dealings are going on, and he seems no stranger to their ways. Parks brings to life a dark side of Glasgow from decades past in bleak but vivid detail, shirking nothing and likely curling a few toes for the faint of heart on his journey to the bottom of the bloody truth. His style keeps you hooked, each turn making you flip the pages faster, gripped and in search of the answer.
Bloody January is a startlingly excellent addition to the Scottish crime scene, even more so as a debut. Detectives, welcome McCoy to your ranks. He'll likely (and hopefully) be around for a while.