Another of my rare "real" books... Purchased from a charity shop in Belper, because I thought it was a good idea to have something non-electronic for the journey, and didn't know at that point that I would acquire another two real books in Stuttgart...

This is the second Val McDermid I've read during this trip, but 1979, published in 2021, is the beginning of an entirely new series.



It is billed as "the first Allie Burns thriller". But it's an unusual kind of animal. Not totally a suspense novel, although there are plenty of events looming in the background to provide tension. Not totally a whodunit, although a murder is solved by the end. And our central character -- Allie -- is not a detective but a news hack, a young woman trying to launch a career in journalism by working on The Daily Clarion, a Scottish tabloid based in Glasgow.


Glasgow, 40 years later...

Val McDermid worked as a journalist, so she understands the inside track, and it's the description of 1970s/80s journalism that is the book's strongest point. It's a world of manual typewriters, carbon copies, Teeline shorthand, phone boxes, and cigarette smoke. As one reviewer says, "It is all so authentically portrayed I could almost smell the printing ink and feel the vibration as the presses rolled."

McDermid excels in depicting not only the various newsroom characters and their fiefdoms (some of the types still recognizable in my BBC experience two decades later) but also the excitement of pursuing a good story, and the ins and outs of the legal framework (and people did sail close to the wind, if this account is to be believed -- sometimes the line between investigating and inciting seems very, very thin).

And then there's the sexism, which our Allie is constantly fighting...

The book is also a poignant account of what it was like to be gay during the 1970s in Scotland (homosexual relations remained illegal until 1980, in contrast to England, where the law was changed in 1967). So exhausting and inhibiting to be always keeping secrets -- and so downright dangerous at times.



The narrative is driven by a series of news stories. We have a couple of lightweight pieces to get us going (childbirth on a snowbound train; nudist beaches...). Then Allie and her colleague Danny Sullivan get involved in much heavier stuff. They work first on exposing a seedy team of money-launderers; they then move on to investigating a few hotheads who think they can inject some urgency into the Scottish independence debate by blowing things up with the aid of Semtex purchased from the IRA.

The personal and emotional link that drives Danny from one story to the next didn't quite ring true for me, but that's a relatively minor quibble.

Some reviewers criticize the pace of the first part of the book. I'm not unduly troubled by scene-setting, though, especially in the first volume of a series, and here it was particularly important to establish the characters of Allie and Danny, and the relationship between them.

I found it a good read, and a sometimes shockingly fascinating walk down memory lane. You forget so much...

It also had me looking up stovies, and gave me a few more famous names from Scottish fiction (William McIlvanney, Alasdair Gray...) to add to my reading list.

Will definitely do 1989 at some point...