'Pulp' has become a fashionable term, fuelled partly by the similarities of e-publishing to the cheap'n'cheerful form of piling out downmarket fiction in the USA from the 1930s to the 1950s. The parallels are striking: short wordcounts, brutal, sometimes near-parody noir subject matter, low prices, fast production, and writing furiously for money. Pricing is another thing. The current technique of using KDP Select, to offer books free for a limited period, then hike the price and hope for spillover sales, reflects in some ways the cheap magazine-to-book punting of the past. Tony Black mines this approach to what appears to be great success, though it looks like a tremendous amount of work.
I've downloaded and abandoned books that were being punted in this way on Amazon's Deal of the Day - notably Helen Fitzgerald's The Devil's Staircase and Chris Ewan's Safe House, both of which I suffered a severe allergic reaction to after five pages (brutalised chicklit and clunky supermarket psychosis, respectively). And that's the risk for publishers. Taste and try? Yeah, but if it makes you spit...
From the pulp point of view, Doug Johnstone, whose early work - Tombstoning, The Ossians - I adored (and both available at £1.65 each on Amazon UK for K), has embraced the form fully since Hit and Run, which I'm afraid I just couldn't get on with. Too much Shallow Grave. But hey,what do I know? It's been optioned for TV. The earlier Smokeheads - much better - was a kind of transition into what seems to be a highly stylised, compressed kind of writing. I'll see what the new one, Gone Again, is like.
Which brings me to Malcolm Mackay. The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter (loving that pun) is the first in a trilogy of novels about Glasgow gunman Calum Maclean. The second, How a Gunman Says Goodbye, is coming soon.
Mackay is from Stornoway, aged 31, and he is part of no literary clique. No university education, partly home-educated due to illness and he has rarely left the island of Lewis. Initially I suspected he was an English teacher engaged in some affectionate literary tributes to influences like Hammett and Thompson, but no, he worked only sporadically in call centres and being published - by Pan, in hardback - is like the greatest adventure on earth, according to this excellent interview by Jackie McGlone. Hates research, which really struck a chord with me. So many writers are obsessed with research and background details to the detriment of their work. Has only been to Glasgow three or four times...
That means that despite being Glasgow-set, there is nothing to give The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter the 'Glasgow noir' flavour pioneered by the great William McIlvanney in Laidlaw. Which, almost inconceivably in this digital age, appears to be out of print and unKindled.
No streets are named by Mackay. His could be any big city, really. Anywhere in the world, as the language is devoid of Scottish patois, slang or dialect. It's very far from a whodunnit. You know from the word go what's happening, what's going to happen. But this book captures better than any Scottish crime novel I've read (save Louise Welsh's stunning The Cutting Room) the sheer pathological blankness of true evil.
And it's written with a cool, understated, present-tense clarity that is, yes, hugely influenced by the classic US noir writers like Willeford and Thompson, but comes without the sense of self-conscious imitation, of mediation, you get in others who have adopted the pulp model. It's laconic, threatening, full of dread and brutality. Calum is an amazing character, so sympathetic, so dangerous, so appalling. So...measured.
It's a fantastically powerful piece of work. Can't wait for the next instalment. Very expensive, though, for the moment - £6.60 on Kindle, last time I looked, and no paperback until June. Ironic. But then this is l'haute pulpe!
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