Not So Tartan Terrors

Nick Garrard investigates the dark world of Tartan Noir

Feature by Nick Eardley | 15 Aug 2007

The press love a good hold-all term. For futuristic-yet-grim read ‘Ballardian’, for pertaining-to-bureaucratic-headaches read ‘kafkaesque’. Used wisely, a clutch of labour saving phrases can rescue delicate fingers from potential typing-induced injury. Greater still is the urge to lump barely-connected artists together into ill-defined movements – the true masters of the art, the NME, throw up genres and scenes with greater prolificacy than Pete Doherty does his lunch.

One such phrase is ‘Tartan Noir’, coined to embrace those various Scottish authors producing contemporary crime fiction. A broad and generic term, it has been applied to everyone from Ian Rankin to Louise Welch, with scant regard for differences in style or expression: while most of these authors share a reliance on Scottish locales and tones that sway from foggy murk to deepest black, the similarities go no further. One could scarcely mistake a Rankin police procedural for the bloody humour and acid wit of a Christopher Brookmyre volume.

Such lazy branding has not been without critics: writing in the New York Times, Charles Taylor has said that the term carries an ‘inescapably condescending twinge’ and that it suggests ‘something quaint about hard-boiled crime fiction…from the land of kilts and haggis’. Indeed, when Scottish writers are so evidently leading the field in crime fiction, far beyond the hack-and-slash formula dramatics of their American counterparts, such denigration can only carry an air of snobbish dismissal.

How encouraging, then, to see so many of those associated with the genre scheduled to appear at this year’s book festival. Perhaps here they can finally do away with the dull limitations of the term. Aside from the many appearances from Ian Rankin – needless to say, sold out (but for the comic book debate we blithely plugged last week) – a number of key figures will be present. Christopher Brookymre will be attending, promoting his latest novel Attack of the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks. A manic collision between conventional crime novel and scathing investigative foray into the murky world of psychic investigation, it should certainly provide bountiful material for discussion.

Elsewhere in the festival schedule, a mixture of up and coming authors are interspersed with a number of veteran figures: Campbell Armstrong, author of more than 20 novels, who’s Glasgow-set Lou Perlman sequences have been described as ‘the best-kept secrets in crime fiction’, will be appearing alongside relative newcomer Ray Banks. Both authors produce work that is fresh and challenging: Armstrong tempers his fiction with a vein of wry humour, while Banks’ fiction is weighted with literary, cerebral content.

Another interesting evening is to be had in the company of Stuart Macbride and Allan Guthrie, both writers receiving great acclaim for their slim, pared down takes on the crime novel. Guthrie sets aside the stereotypical leads, replacing the old mask of the hard-bitten maverick cop with a coterie of criminals and street level thugs. Macbride’s style is a little more conventional, but he is making a name for himself with his gritty, murderous prose.

Saddled among a strong bill of authors and personalities, crime fiction is dealt a great hand this year, a sign that mainstream acceptance draws ever nearer for a stable of writers as informed, incisive and talented as any of their more broadly accepted counterparts. Perhaps ushering in the death of ‘Tartan Noir’ might help to sweep aside other generic concerns. It’s all fiction, after all.