Blogtour review - The Weekenders by David F Ross

The Weekenders (Raskine House, 1) 
David F Ross
Orenda Books, 27 February 2025
Available as: PB, 292pp, audio, e   
Source: Advance copy
ISBN( PB): 9781916788305

I'm grateful to Orenda Books for sending me a copy of The Weekenders to consider for review, and to Anne of Random Things Tours for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

It's always great to see a new book from David F Ross and it's even better that this is the first of a trilogy. 

The Weekenders introduces us to the mysterious, troubling country mansion mansion Raskine House. I think I see thematic connections between the troubling goings on there and those in Ross's Welcome to the Heady Heights which was, like this book, partly set in 1960s Glasgow. There are also some common characters. So while she doesn't appear I have hopes that in later parts we may meet Barbara Sherman again.

While The Weekenders mostly takes place in the later 1960s, it also looks back to the Second World War where a central relationship - between Jamesie Campbell, later a Glasgow trades unionist and politician, and Michael McTavish - is forged when they meet as soldiers in the nightmare of the Italian campaign. Nobody comes out well from that section of the narrative, neither Campbell nor McTavish, nor the sadistic officers who pretty much betray them. Rather, these events are a bitter prelude to the later story. The writing here makes no bones about what happened in the war: at times the book is a hard read.

Later we see what the two men have become, and what Glasgow has become, both being discovered by two outsider figures, Stevie 'Minto' Milloy and Donald 'Doodle' Malpass. Milloy is an ex-footballer, dropped from the game after a cruel injury and turned reporter, while Malpass is a courtroom sketch artist who sometimes assists the police. Several years apart, the two investigate the murders of young foreign students which seem to be connected to Raskine House and its rumoured weekend no-holds-barred parties. (one of the links I saw to 'Heady Heights'). 

As a background to that, Ross brings alive a raucous, surface-confident, but, I felt, also a hurting, city which both Milloy and Malpass are part of but are also distanced from. They have their roles, yes, but there is an Establishment, which they're not in. Both men live in a sense on sufferance from that, as does John Meikle, the veteran reporter who's Milloy's mentor. It's an Establishment that has grown fat and canny over the centuries, profiting first from enslavement and Empire, then from war, and more recently, from the ideological polarisation of the 20th century. Money and power before ideology or truth, and these puppet masters aren't going to let go a whit of its money or power.

There is another darkness here too associated with Raskine House itself - a darkness which the muck-and-brass merchants don't wholly comprehend. In this book, Glasgow is far from a safe place, whether you're a visiting student, police, nosy reporter or even one of those who think they pull the strings. Glasgow itself will, I think, have the last word here.

If all that sounds rather remote and grim, this book was, as are all of Ross's stories, also immensely entertaining, featuring rich and vivid characters who don't so much populate the page as march off it and sit down with you for a drink and a chat. Their voices sing in your head, their lives move and affect, their fates - some of them - sadden you as if they were old friends. Ross shows us real people showing how their desire simply to live and enjoy that living is baffled, diverted, sometimes blocked, but never - until the last breath - wholly defeated. (Ross's characters are all the more real for speaking in authentic language).

I am really looking forward to the rest of this trilogy!

For more information about The Weekenders, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy The Weekenders from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith or Waterstones.

#Blogtour #Review - Dashboard Elvis is Dead by David F Ross

Dashboard Elvis is Dead
David F Ross
Orenda Books, 8 December 2022
Available as: PB, 300pp, e, audio
Source: Advance copy
ISBN(PB): 9781914585401

I'm grateful to Karen at Orenda Books for sending me a copy of Dashboard Elvis is Dead to consider for review and to Anne at Random Things Tours for inviting me to join the book's blogtour.

In Dashboard Elvis is Dead, David F Ross hacks into the secret history of the early 1980s music industry, giving us an inside account of the rise and spectacular fall of The Hyptones, a band of young Glaswegian hopefuls for who everything goes wrong on a fateful tour of the US.

A tour which is a downfall for Ross too, because David F Ross appears in the book as the failed writer who documented the band's experiences and was badly burned by doing so. (So fact, fiction and identity are blurred form the start with real musicians, actors and artists appearing with and - one suspects, sometimes without - approval throughout the book).

Thirty years later, in the wake of the Scottish independence referendum, Ross picks up with Jude Montgomery, a revered photo journalist, who's arrived in Glasgow. What they seem to have in common is a love for, and a fascination with, the Hyptones and their one hit, An Independent State of Mind, which has become an anthem for the Yes campaign.

It will take the rest of the story to explain how everyone's paths cross, and especially how Jude, who was running away from her Texas trailer park home when she came across The Hyptones the first time, fared in between. That story is an amazing saga of growth and suffering, of finding identity and seeking redemption, that frankly could have driven a whole sequence of novels. I loved Jude's honesty and her self-analysis. I loved Ross's evocation of the racially divided, tense Texan town from which Jude starts. I ,loved the portraits of 1980s San Francisco, of gentrifying New York later in the decade and in the 90s. Most of all I loved Jude. She is a well realised and sympathetic character who just has an awful habit of doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Generally driven by good intentions, Jude makes mistakes, burns bridges as if she had shares in the ferry company, and generally leaves a trail of damaged and more or less resentful (or, in one case, dead) friends, mentors, exes and employers across the USA. Nevertheless, she perseveres, and through this story she's visibly growing, exploring her own identity and, in a somewhat twisted way, trying to make amends. (Ultimately it's down to her that An Independent State of Mind isn't wholly forgotten). 

I wouldn't say the same of Jamie, a tragic figure who is the other focus of Dashboard Elvis. Jamie is at the centre of The Hyptones, and he's the one who takes the fall when things go wrong. At his core he believes I think that he deserves that - the band has its own secret history - but really that isn't fair. Everyone deserves a chance, or a second chance, but ultimately Jamie's guilt robs him of that, leading him mon a destructive path that only reinforces the guilt. 

In describing the trajectory of the band, Ross brings the same sensibility to the lives and aspirations of young working class Scots in the 70s and 80s as he did in his Disco Days trilogy and in There's Only One Danny Garvey. Their voices ring true, lighting up the pages of the book in expressive Scots, albeit slightly indignant, as though being exhibited in a novel wasn't how they expected to spend the evening. (The exception is Jamie's girlfriend, the enigmatic AFB, 'Anna F*****g Belle' who in contrast uses standard English, a slight marker of class or privilege that prefigures her role in the later parts of the book).

There's an interesting contrast between the lives of Jude, who did manage to "get out" but, as her story makes clear, had to sacrifice a lot along the way, and the band members who as I've alluded to above, are basically on a downward slope throughout the book. Especially Jamie. Like Jude, Jamie makes many bad decisions and ends up with lots of regrets. But he's less in a position to try and put things right. The parallels and differences between Jamie and Jude are fascinating, posing a whole series of what if questions revolving around gender, racial identity and social setting. Both deserve a way out.  Jude gets one, Jamie doesn't, a fate he shares with most of his bandmates. 

This is eventually portrayed in a brilliant piece of non-writing. After sections dealing with the two fairly evenly, eventually Ross sort of has Jamie just... fade away, again contrasting with Jude whose climactic scenes are vivid and consequential. While Jamie's location and eventual fate are key plot points, we don't actually see them, and this building absence of a character is an eloquent way to express what he's become in the lives of those who knew him and those who don't. His absence is almost a more pointed depiction of him than his presence could be.

Oh I could go on praising this book but really, if you don't want to read it by now then what's the point of you? Just take my advice and read Dashboard Elvis is Dead. It's so many things. A very funny book. A sharp examination of young lives, of origins, identity and the complications of living, ageing and "growing up". A bit of a satire on dependence and independence. And a complex, engaging story set where music, crime, social aspiration, lust and politics overlap and mutate. 

Just pure brilliance.

For more information about Dashboard Elvis is Dead, see the publisher's website here - and of course the other stops on the blogtour which you can see listed on the poster below. 

You can buy Dashboard Elvis is Dead from your local high street bookshop or online from Bookshop UK, Hive Books, Blackwell's, Foyle's, WH Smith, Waterstones or Amazon.

 

Review - The Less Dead by Denise Mina

The Less Dead

Denise Mina

Harvill Secker, 20 August 2020

Available as: HB, 352pp, e, audio

Read as: Advance e-copy via NetGalley

ISBN: 9781787301726

Snap verdict: wow wow wow wow wow

'When we get killed they call us the "less dead"...'

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of The Less Dead via NetGalley.

After the globetrotting of Conviction, Mina returns to home ground for this Glasgow-set mystery which links the very different cities of the 2020s (maybe I should now just say "20s" but that sounds like flappers and jazz) and the 1980s, digging up unfinished business and crashing all kinds of different worlds together - the comfortable professionals and the struggling poor, the settled families and those with chaotic lives. It's a book I really found hard to leave alone, gobbling chapter after chapter and neglecting my family and dogs. "Unputdownable" is an overused  cliché, but this book is the real thing.

The junction between all of the different worlds is Margo Dunlop, a middle-aged Glaswegian GP who - following the death of adoptive mother Janette - is searching for information about her birth mother, Susan. We first see her waiting nervously in the offices of an adoption charity, not helped by well-meaning but charmless social worker Tracey. When Susan's sister Nikki breezes in late, we see the first of those collisions. Margo's educated, professional. Nikki's... not. Laced through this book are Margo's (rather) dismal attempts to "accept" Nikki, to not be a snob, and the tendrils of guilt that grow from her failure to do this. The joke on Margo is that Nikki doesn't need to be "accepted", she has her own life which may seem a strange life to Margo but Nikki's OK with it.

It soon becomes clear that Margo herself has hit something of a crisis in her life and isn't as "settled" as she thinks. She's hard up, on long term sick leave, failing to to cope with her loss of Janette or her relationship with her ex, Joe (who seems a charming man, if you want someone to turn up at 2AM with a bike slung over his shoulder). She finds it hard dealing with Nikki ('She feels as if Nikki has stolen the day from her'). It's all symbolised by Margo's intermittent attempts to clear out Janette's old, rambling house - another collision of worlds, set in an area that's gentrifying very fast. 

This is the background. We also soon meet Margo's oldest, best friend, Lilah, who's in a deeply unhealthy situation with her own stalkery ex, 'that wanker Richard', a situation that's spilling out into her group of friends ('It's messy and they've all been sucked into the collapsing star of Richard's and Lilah's relationship') and we hear of Margo's brother, Thomas, also adopted. Mina brings them to vivid life - Lilah's increasingly scary encounters with Richard, often staged in front of her girlfriends, Joe's baffled incomprehension that he's not with Margo any more, and especially, Margo's more and more frenzied displacement activity as she tries not to confront many and varied facets of her life. A diversion is just what's needed! And here we are! Margo discovers that Susan was murdered and the crime has never been solved. There are whispers of a police cover-up, that Susan was one of a string of murdered Glasgow sex workers. Here is a cause she can adopt, a problem she can solve, a way she can come into Nikki's life with some control.

Margo begins an investigation - partly into the crime, partly into Susan herself and her origins and background, partly into the Glasgow that killed here: that dark, 80s Glasgow of which traces still linger and which you can step into if you're lucky... or perhaps, if you're very unlucky. Nikki's something of a guide - she's an amazing character, a force of life, a survivor. But if you patronise her, look down on her, ignore her, you do it at your peril. And Margo will visit strange places even in familiar parts of the city ('She'd swear on her life that she has never, ever seen that pub before').

Other perils also walk these pages. Mina does something awkward, jarring, very creepy, but totally brilliant with the text. Alongside the Margo-narrator, there's another voice here, mostly staying in the shadows but sometimes stepping out to grab the story, steer it down dank paths strewn with a really unsettling vein of misogyny and hate. It'll happen in the middle of a sentence. For a few words you're not sure what's going on - then you know, yes, he's back. Those words correlate with a rather sinister game that increasingly draws Margo deep into that other Glasgow, the one that's supposed to be dead. I found it very very creepy and while - as I said above - you have to keep turning those pages, at times I also didn't want to, for fear of what I might read next. Denise Mina takes the gloves off in her depiction of male hatred for women: it's not only that other voice, we also see Richard become scarier and scarier (well, we hear about it - it's mostly reported second and third and hand, which somehow makes it even worse, like a news ticker scrolling with reports of chaos and violence).

The writing in The Less Dead is glorious - always on the nose, capturing an exact moment, feeling or scene. One character, swearing her head off, is nevertheless 'serious as a newsreader'. Another 'performs looking for a taxi' to try and repel a pack of rowdy men late one night.  The characterisation is also brilliant. Margo, as a GP, assesses Nikki. 'She doesn't have the sleepiness of a methadone user or the drowsy disgust of someone on valium.' Later, when she has to report a shocking crime, she notes that the police officer who responds is using the same verbal techniques for managing a stressful encounter as she's been taught herself ('eye contacting her half to death with training-course empathy'). Gradually, allusively, we learn about Margo's earlier life, her attempts to fit in (a consequence of adoption? Or just part of modern life?), her enjoyment of the privilege of being 'thin, young and white' and being able to sneer at those who weren't. Margo and Lilah's relationship at school in a nutshell: 'Slimness was suddenly a currency between them. They got thin at each other.'

We also hear about the attitudes of the respectable (police, social workers, journalists) to those in that other world - the drug users, the sex-workers - the judgments made, the failures of the police to protect the weak. Things were worse back in the 80s, we're told (when Margo delves into the newspaper archives for information, she 'feels as if she's reading in a language language she doesn't understand, as if she's eavesdropping on aggressively heterosexual Victorians... DEAD VICE GIRL'S FEAR OF STALKER') and the book is set up as an opposition between then and now, but as one character, an ex-DI who did her best, admits, things aren't much better, her best wasn't enough. The book seethes with loose ends, with second bests, missed chances. 

And second chances too. Margo comes from a family - the Brodies - renowned for their bloody-mindedness, and if there's enough of them in her to get through all the dangers here, then perhaps she can begin to fix a few things. Perhaps.

An intelligent, gripping and compassionate crime novel. Just a superb read. 

#Blogtour review - Welcome to the Heady Heights by David F Ross

Cover design by kid-ethic.com

Welcome to the Heady Heights
David F Ross
Orenda, 21 March 2019
PB, e 264pp

Today I'm joining the blogtour for David F Ross's new book, Welcome to the Heady Heights. I'm grateful to Anne Cater and to Orenda for inviting me onto the tour and providing a free copy of the book for review.

I was especially looking forward to this book, having immensely enjoyed Ross's previous Disco Days trilogy, featuring the lives of a group of young men (and later, as older men) growing up in the 70s in the West of Scotland. Now, he returns to that decade, with something of the same vibe, but the story's largely set in Glasgow and his protagonists are older, the chief among them, Archie Blunt, being in his 50s.

That means looking at the decade through the other end of the telescope, as it were, which is fascinating. In Disco Days there was the joy of discovery, of new things: new music, new life experiences - such a lot to learn. There were some alarming moments but one sensed that youthful optimism must win through - as, by the end of the third book, The Man Who Loved Islands, it kind of had, after many twists and turns.

Heady Heights is darker, more cynical. Archie's lost his wife and lost his job on the buses, his dad is succumbing to dementia, he's a middle aged man defying the demographics just by still being alive in the East End of Glasgow - and that city is being torn apart, razed, as solid tenements are replaced by flimsy tower blocks or new urban highways. Even Glasgow Corporation is giving way to the new Regional Council.

David F Ross

And behind that is a darker theme still as rumours spread about beloved popular entertainers. Rumours nobody takes seriously.(Who'd have thought it?) And homeless young men are going missing. Disappearances nobody takes seriously (who'd have thought it?) except for one young WPC, Barbara Sherman, who's already out of place in an Ashes To Ashes retro style nick with degrading initiation rituals and ingrained sexism.

So there is plenty of the dark side of the 70s here - but Ross also conveys a jauntiness, a zest for life, through his characters which does I think carry over from his earlier books. Yes, there are almost suicidal quantities of drink, of heart-attack inducing food, run-ins with Glasgow gangsters. Archie's got a lot to despair over - indeed more and more as the book goes on - but he's determined throughout, constantly spotting angles, respecting of no-one, scamming and scheming and when opportunity knocks as he accidentally rescues a beloved TV star from a jealous husband, he's ready with a scheme to take a new band to the top. Yes, outwardly Archie's confident almost to the point of arrogance.

Inwardly - well, a man doesn't talk about these things, does he?  And that "almost" is redeemed. Almost. There are plenty here - Establishment figures, wealthy men, entitled men - who abuse their position and who are truly, deeply arrogant. A well known, white haired DJ. A star of light entertainment. A mercurial and self-interested Glasgow ex Labour MP who's set up his own party. Figures living in a world of mahogany and privilege. What will happen when the two worlds collide?

It's a fun, compulsively readable, rollercoaster of a book with a real bite to it and some genuinely sad moments. The extensive use of Glasgow vernacular adds to the atmosphere (and no, this English reader didn't have any problem following it) but really, Archie, Geordie and their pals are just infectiously compelling characters you want to keep reading and reading about. It would have been nice to read more about Barbara Sherman and journalist Gail Proctor - perhaps in another book, Mr Ross? - but with this one I really, really felt it was a shame when the book had to end.

You can buy or preorder Welcome to the Heady Heights variously from your local bookshop, including online via Hive Books, or from Blackwell's, Waterstones or Amazon - and doubtless elsewhere too.

And you should.

Blogtour review - House of Spines

House of Spines
Michael J Malone
Brenda Books, 31 October 2017
PB, 294pp

I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance copy of this book and for inviting me to take part in the blogtour.

Glaswegian Ranald McGie hasn't had an easy life - after discovering his parents dead when he was eighteen, he succumbed to bipolar episodes, split up with his wife Martie and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. He slowly rebuilt and recovered, having lost almost everything, but he considers his life a dull, grey affair, the peaks and troughs all dialled down by the drugs he takes to control his condition.

Now, for a change, fate seems to be smiling on him. Ran unexpectedly inherits a swish house from a great uncle he'd never heard of. It has luxurious bed and reception rooms, a gym with a sauna and pool and, best of all, a massive library. All he has to do is live there and enjoy it.

What can possibly go wrong?

A lot, obviously. The alert reader will already have spotted the Gothic flourishes - a mysterious house, parts of which are to be left alone; taciturn servants who seem to have their own agenda and - not a spoiler - a whiff of the supernatural. It's a tried and tested recipe but none the worse for that and, like a poet composing a good sonnet, in Malone's hands the strictures of the genre stimulate creativity and produce an enthralling and at times downright creepy story.

Michael Malone

Of course the mental health angle only adds to this - we're with Ran all the way as he agonises over what he's seeing and debates its reality with himself, as he begins to uncover layers of his family history that he never suspected but which may illuminate his condition, as as he faces hard truths that he's tried to hide away for years. A friend suggests a supernatural angle to the mystery; Ran wavers between welcoming this as a more palatable alternative than losing his hold on reality - and terror at what it would mean if it were true.

Ran isn't, perhaps, the most proactive of characters but then the situation he's in is isolating, paralysing and like nothing he's experienced before.  I found his reactions believable (though I've never suffered from Ran's condition and I can't say how well Malone captures it, it does ring true to me). In stories like this one is often (silently) screaming at the protagonist to wise up, to take control. I found myself not doing that. Malone builds great sympathy with Ran, even when he does some very silly things, and any reader with a heart will I think be cheering him on - while recognising his faults.

Above all, perhaps, it's interesting to see a male protagonist in this sort of Hitchcockian situation, one which (male) authors often seem to inflict by preference on women. And to recognise that - as in real life - it's not an easy one to get out of.

I loved Malone's previous book, A Suitable Lie, and there are some parallels here - isolation, growing paranoia, no way out - but also great differences, most notably, as I've said, the way this book plays with a familiar genre and makes it new.

It was a great read, and I look forward to reading what Malone does next.