Three Writers
The Glasgow Novels of Malcolm Donnelly
Growing up in a harsh, working-class area of Glasgow, Malcolm Donnelly turned to reading as a means of escape. From his teens onwards, writing served the same purpose. When he was sober, Malcolm’s widowed father, Angus, felt inadequate to the task of single-handedly raising three boys while working long shifts at the Tennent’s brewery. When drunk, he was no less inadequate, but alcohol dulled his frustration.
In his early fiction, Donnelly took flight from these dismal surroundings, preferring exotic settings and fantastical plots. His first three novels were set entirely in countries and regions where Donnelly had never been: Borneo, Panama, the Maghreb. Rather than alcoholics and Glasgow hard men, the novels are populated by shamanic tribes, arms dealers, pirates of the Malacca Strait, warlords and savages. In short, these were the kind of books based not on personal experience, but on other books — and on movies, comics and cartoons.
It was not until Blades or Shadows (1979) that Donnelly adopted his native Glasgow as a fictional setting. The city he depicts is a vision of hell. The dark, polluted streets and piss-sodden alleys bear witness to lives of unremitting bleakness. The pubs where much of the novel’s action takes place (though ‘action’ is a dubious word) are sordid to the point of hallucination. Drinking is constant, joyless and brutal. Sex, when it happens, is cursory and humiliating. Fat, toothless whores grope the cocks and balls of the men who sit drinking lager amid clouds of cigarette smoke. The men listlessly swat the whores away, having scant interest in sex and probably no capacity for it either. A brawny, sullen man who habitually downs three whiskeys for every pint of Foster’s he drinks, swings a punch at a particularly foul whore who attempts to entice him by juggling her enormous tits in his face. The punch knocks her to the floor; the other drinkers watch indifferently before returning to their conversations or their pints.
The novel’s climax is a long, desultory, expletive-ridden dialogue between Sam, a red-headed youth of twenty-two without prospects, interests or aspirations (he is the novel’s protagonist), and a much older man with a drink-ruddy face and a rasping cough, named Phil the Club. The dialogue’s binding theme is human isolation: both agree it cannot be escaped (Sam adds: why would you want to?). A huge woman named Jolene, ‘with layers of chin you could sink a fist in’, briefly joins the conversation. Sam tells her to fuck off. Phil and Sam broach such topics as Scottish independence, page-3 girls, English women, the IRA, Celtic and Rangers, the Queen, the greatest footballers of all time, the greatest footballers of the decade, and infidelity.
At the end of the dialogue, Sam staggers out of the pub to throw up against the wall. Phil the Club (who has drunk as much as Sam, if not more) orders another pint, which he drinks as he has drunk all the others: in three vast gulps. The novel ends with Phil sitting on his stool, gazing into the gloom of the pub. The author compares him to the Buddha.
In Mitchelmore (1985), Glasgow is again the setting. The city is evoked no less pessimistically. This time, a series of horrific murders in Glasgow’s most run-down areas provides the skeleton of plot on which the novel is fleshed out. Jake Mitchelmore is the detective charged with investigating the murders. Initially he pursues his duty with a marked lack of energy or conviction. It is unclear whether he believes the murderer cannot be caught, or if he simply has no desire to do so. Mitchelmore is a lugubrious man, given to ruminating dourly while gazing into the black waters of the Clyde, or at the faces of the Glaswegians who flow past him on the streets, ‘a river of derelict souls, lurching towards Nightmare’.
All of the victims — seven, at the point when Mitchelmore takes on the investigation — are male, between the ages of twenty and fifty-two, and all are football fans. Four are fans of Celtic, two are fans of Rangers, and the other — this is the detail that eventually brings Mitchelmore to the brink of madness — follows Hearts. The men have come to grief on deserted streets or in lanes while returning from the brutal drinking sessions which are the leitmotif of Donnelly’s Glasgow fiction. More often than not, the victims are killed by a single blow to the back of the head, sometimes while pissing against a wall.
Two theories are proposed. First, that two killers are responsible, and Glasgow is playing host to a tit-for-tat series of attacks among football fans gone to the dark side. In this theory, one of the killers is a Celtic fan, while the other follows Rangers. (So why did the Hearts fan have to die? wonders Mitchelmore.) Second, that the murders have been committed by a lone individual — a serial killer, though Donnelly refrains from using the term throughout the novel, for reasons best known to himself.
Mitchelmore soon discounts the first theory — the multiplication of motives is dangerous and inelegant. Despite the opposition of his superiors (and his rivals), Mitchelmore knows in his heart of hearts that the crimes are those of a single, profoundly disturbed individual, probably an alienated young man from the inner city whose parents were alcoholics or abusers — a young man, in fact, not unlike Mitchelmore in his youth, before he found his direction in life through a career in the force and a passion for training pigeons.
‘I see you,’ whispers Mitchelmore one night, drunk, peering out the window of the high-rise flat where he has lived since his divorce eight years ago. ‘I know you, I feel you. I. . taste you.’
To the concern of his senior officers, and of Nancy, the social worker with whom he has become romantically involved, Mitchelmore loses interest in anything outside of the football-fan murders. His relationship with Nancy falls apart — Mitchelmore hardly seems to notice. He no longer drinks in his local. He takes to sleeping at his desk, waking with a start to find himself peering at an assemblage of photographs: the victims’ wounds; the locations of their deaths; the crowds outside the Ibrox and Parkhead on match days; derelict flats and dank, gloomy hallways with no obvious link to the case. Mitchelmore starts drinking in the inner-city pubs once frequented by the victims, concealing his loyalty when in Rangers pubs (he is a Celtic supporter), saying little, watching, waiting (but waiting for what? Even he seems not to know).
His sergeant, Duncan Shearer, suspends Mitchelmore. ‘You’re losing it, Jake,’ he rasps. ‘Get a grip, before there’s no way back.’ Needless to say, Mitchelmore pays little heed and continues his obsessive investigation. One more murder is committed which may or may not be connected to the others: a Rangers fan is stabbed outside a chipper near the Ibrox. Mitchelmore is certain that this is the next killing in the series. By now, the reader has ample reason to doubt Mitchelmore’s judgement, indeed his participation in a shared reality. Winter sets in. Mitchelmore, no longer in contact with friends, family or former colleagues, drinks more heavily. He gets into fights. A whore wanks him off down a lane but he is too drunk to come. He throws up. He collapses. Owed rent, his landlord appears at Mitchelmore’s flat and finds he has not been sleeping there with any regularity. The muted roar of inner-city Glasgow closes in over Mitchelmore. Christmas arrives. The city is cold, and silent but for the wind blowing through the lanes, past shuttered-up pubs and factories. A child cries in the distance. A dog whimpers and gnaws on its own leg. Here the novel ends.
After Mitchelmore, Malcolm Donnelly abandoned Glasgow as a fictional setting. His subsequent novels, Queen of the Narcos and Jazz Vendetta, published after four- and five-year intervals respectively, were set in Harlem, Peru and Nigeria, and saw a return to the fantastical storylines and buoyant mood of Donnelly’s earlier work. He died in 1999, following complications of the large intestine.