It’s been raining in Glasgow all weekend, as is almost by law in the winter (and for much of the rest of the year, the annual average is 167 wet days), but the skies are generous and grant a respite. The plan, instead of a formal interview with Alan Parks in a cafe (the alternative), is a walk through the Scottish city and the settings of the novels starring detective Harry McCoy. In Spain, the fourth in the series, Death in April (Tusquets / Univers, in Catalan), has just been published.
We are at the entrance to Central Station, a historic building that dates back to 1879, as the train stations used to be, and reflects the growth of the city with industrialization and its role in the expansion of the British Empire. Why does Parks live in Glasgow, when (theoretically) he could anywhere in the world? “I adore it, it’s where I grew up, I spent my childhood, I went to university, I love even the cold, the wind and the rain.” You know, about tastes there is nothing written.
The author’s passion for Glasgow is evident when he shows the settings of his books on a tour of several hours, under dark skies that never quite carry out their threat: a Chinese restaurant on Gordon Street frequented by gangsters, a hotel on the banks of the river that had the first automatic door in Scotland and is now a hostel, the old morgue, the Courts, an old market next to the train tracks that has been abandoned for years, the bus station (where the first scene of his first novel takes place , Bloody January ), the House of Fraser department store on pedestrian Buchanan Street, the police headquarters, the statue of La Pasionaria…
“It’s an industrial, working-class city, similar to Liverpool or Belfast,” he says. While Edinburgh stands for government, banking, insurance, Glasgow prospered with shipyards, textiles and manufacturing. But now all that has disappeared, it depends entirely on the service sector. What does persist is tribalism, the division between Catholics and Protestants, the hatred between Celtic and Rangers supporters (I am one of the former, although I rarely go to the stadium). Of course, the rivalry is no longer as bloody as it once was.
Parks is not interested in questions of police procedure, what he wants is to describe that Glasgow soul through a series of novels (he has twelve negotiated, each with reference to a month of the year in the title). When he lost his job in the music industry, he received severance pay and decided to try his hand at literature. Today he is one of the authors of the genre known as tartan noir, along with Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, Val McDermid or the late William McIlvanney.
He travels a lot to festivals and literary promotions, but whenever he is in Glasgow (screams can be heard from his flat at Hampden Park stadium) his routine is to take a long walk, ten kilometers. “It is my source of inspiration, memories of my childhood and adolescence come to my head, I see a building and decide that it is a good fictional setting”. And it shows the house of Harry McCoy (the protagonist of his novels) on Garner Street, the steepest street in the city, in the San Francisco style, the pub (The Victoria) that he frequents on Dumbarton Road, or the mansion of the gangster Stevie Cooper, off the fashionable Great Western Road.
The relationship between the policeman and the criminal is perhaps the most original element of Parks’s novels. Stevie protected Harry from bullying at school, and the two are still thick and thin, helping each other, despite being on different sides of the law, with the ethical conflicts that this implies. “Neither of them are inspired by anyone in particular, they have traits that I have picked up from here and there. Obviously McCoy could not be a police officer today, there are things that were tolerated before and not today. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is the abundance of drugs on the streets of Glasgow.”
Parks’ author of reference is James Ellroy, and he would like to be to Glasgow what the American is to Los Angeles. Set throughout the seventies, his novels, beyond the plot that serves as the common thread, are full of social realism, they are a place and a time. His original idea was to make a historical book, but he evolved into the detective genre. “It’s something that came naturally, without wanting it.”
Parks is not one of those authors who has a strict routine to work. He writes whenever he feels like it, be it at home, on a train or on a plane. “Dialogue is very important to me, I don’t want it to seem canned but for the characters to speak naturally, with the usual idioms and metaphors of the 1970s. He also spent a lot of time in the library, reading the newspapers of the time to see how people dressed, what cars there were.
The walk ends and it starts to rain. Although it must be recognized that Parks’ Glasgow has its what, if one is into what could be called industrial noir…
