CRASH LAND BY DOUG JOHNSTONE • (Faber & Faber) 3 November 2016 An iconic character through much Western fiction, but especially crime noir, is the “femme fatale”—the beautiful, mysterious, seductive woman who turns the hero’s life upside down. It’s not an archetype Doug Johnstone, exploring the edges of domestic noir, has used before, but his approach […]
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Beck Volume 2 (Review)
BECK – THE SERIES, VOLUME 2 (Nordic Noir) Available now. “A person doesn’t have to be evil just because they do evil things.” It’s precisely the subtle philosophical maturity that exemplifies the measured, contained approach that Swedish detective drama Beck invariably displays. Packaged for the UK as the second volume of the Beck series, these […]
Going Underground
It wasn’t the most auspicious of beginnings. Within a few hours of the Glasgow District Subway first opening its doors, on 14 December 1896, the whole system was massively over-crowded with—according to The Glasgow Herald—“a great rush of all classes”. Many of these passengers were not using the new underground railway to travel speedily between […]
Full Steam Ahead – 70 Years of the Waverley
Glaswegians quickly dubbed it a “Paddler for a Pound” but the deal, which saw ownership of the PS Waverley change hands on 8th August 1974, wasn’t quite how it appeared. “The brand new Royal Bank of Scotland One Pound note was actually given to me by the Chairman of the Scottish Transport Group, which I […]
Crime Scene #5 Reviews
First published in Crime Scene #5. THE FJÄLLBACKA MURDERS (Arrow Films) Out Now Following her parents’ deaths in a car accident, author Erica Falck (Claudia Galli) and her policeman husband inherit the parental home in the Swedish coastal town of Fjällbacka, described by their lawyer as “Paradise on Earth” but – as this first series of […]
Claire Cunningam on ‘The Way You Look (At Me) Tonight’
How do we look at each other? How do we allow ourselves to be seen? How do our bodies shape the ways we perceive the world around us? These are some of the questions raised by a new work by acclaimed Scottish disabled artist Claire Cunningham, who will be performing – for the first time […]
Bridging the Tay
Mention the words “Tay” and “Bridge”, and we’re all too easily inclined to add the word “Disaster”. However, with the addition of “Road”, it’s a different matter entirely: 50 years after its official opening – on 18 August, 1966 – by The Queen Mother, the Tay Road Bridge still successfully carries an average 26,000 vehicles across […]
