Crime writer Alan Parks on wanting to be the James Ellroy of Glasgow

ALAN Parks is an amiable bear of a man who these days spends his time wandering around Glasgow thinking up ways to murder people. No, don’t worry. His criminal activities are purely fictional. Parks is that not-so-rare thing these days, a Scottish crime writer.
His first novel Bloody January is out now. It is set in the city in which he lives and takes place over the course of a few weeks at the start of the year (the title might have given that away). The year in question is 1973.
This is crime fiction as time travel, then.  Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep on the radio, The Magic Roundabout on the telly, feather cut hairstyles, pints in Sammy Dow’s and the Muscular Arms. All in the company of Parks’s fictional policeman, Detective Harry McCoy.
It starts, more or less, with a bang. Or a shooting in the Buchanan Street bus station at any rate. “I wanted to get the crime out of the way as quickly as possible,” Parks says when we meet in Glasgow’s city centre. “I’m terrible at whodunnits. I can’t think up these things. So, it’s more of a whydunnit.”
We are sitting in the Cup Tea Lounge in Renfield Street. It used to be De     Quincy’s pub, he reminds me. He spent his 21st birthday here. He has thrown up in this very room, he says. Glasgow was his manor when he was younger. And after years in London it is again.
At 54 he has left it late to become an author. But then he had a perfectly good career in the music industry for the best part of 30 years, so we can maybe forgive him his tardiness. The question is why now?
It’s related to his return Glasgow, he says. Not that he ever totally left. He moved to London in the 1980s, but he always had ties to the city and four, five years ago (he’s a little vague on dates), he decided to move back.
When he did so he started taking night classes on the 20th-century history of the city. He found himself in parts of the city that he hadn’t visited since he was a child. Some of the Glasgow he knew was still there, but much had disappeared. It made him think that it was time for someone to write a history of 20th-century Glasgow.
And then he realised he wasn’t the right person to do that but maybe he could write a crime novel. And that’s what he’s done. It’s a very readable one too.
The Glasgow of Bloody January is the Glasgow of his childhood. Although he grew up in Paisley, his parents were from the city. “My mum was exiled in Paisley much to her horror.”
As a result, he was constantly getting dragged on the bus back to visit family. His great aunt lived on the 23rd floor in the high flats of Dobbies Loan. “It literally looked over the bus station,” he recalls. “It looked like a big toy set, watching these buses coming and going.”
The city, he remembers, was a dark place. Physically dark. He’d wait for the bus at the back of the St Enoch Hotel. “Down there you’d see a lot of homeless people and you’d see a lot of people dressed up to go out on the town. And so, it was a bit of an adventure to come here. I remember it as an exciting and frightening place.”
It is that fear and excitement he tries to tap into in Bloody January. “I always think Glasgow gets represented as a bit one-dimensional in fiction. It all tends to be hard men and battered women, which, I’m sure, sadly, is a lot of people’s experience. But I always remember we used to go to Pettigrew’s and Frasers. Big department stores which seemed really rich.
“And Sir Hugh Fraser was always in the paper, someone who seemed glamorous in a way, and I thought there was more to Glasgow than people suffering under poverty.”
These days Edinburgh is hoaching with fictional detectives. Glasgow a little less so. With the honourable exception of Alex Gray’s Detective Lorimer and Denise Mina’s Alex Morrow, Glasgow crime fiction is still dominated by the memories of Taggart and William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw novels.
Did the shadow of either weigh on him when he was writing Bloody January? “McIlvanney does because I really, really like those books. They’re more like modern European literature than hardboiled Glasgow.”
Comparisons with McIlvanney would terrify him, he says. “Mine isn’t anything near as good.” But he hopes, like McIlvanney, he is writing about a real place; that his Glasgow will be recognisable to those who lived through those times.
He even writes things that happened in the city in January 1973 into the book. And so, Harry McCoy gets to go backstage during a David Bowie gig at Green’s Playhouse. In the sequel currently being written and set a few weeks after Bloody January, Scotland play England at Hampden. England won 5-0, but he is including it because that’s what people in Glasgow would have been talking about. 
If the books take off, he says, he’ll happily take McCoy through the 1970s. But not beyond 1980, he thinks. That’s not of  interest to him. But then maybe that’s because by the 1980s his own life had gone in another direction.
When he was a student studying moral philosophy at Glasgow University Alan Parks met another student, called Lloyd. Lloyd was a wannabe musician. Another mutual friend, Derek, offered to manage Lloyd.
When Parks graduated he couldn’t get a job and sat at home watching videos all day. Lloyd, meanwhile, got himself a band and become a pop star. In 1984 Lloyd Cole and the Commotions became the sound of young Scotland (Lloyd came from Derbyshire, but never mind).
He and his manager were suddenly in demand and they needed someone to answer their office phone in Glasgow when they were in London. They thought of their mate Alan. And that’s how Parks’s musical career started.
After working for the Commotions management company, Parks became creative director at London Records in the 1990s, working with the likes of New Order and All Saints.
“I commissioned the artwork and the videos and the photography. Basically, you were trying to put the visual identity of the band together. And sometimes that came 100 per cent from the band and I facilitated it and sometimes they went: ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’”
He loved the job. And it was a time when visuals mattered. It was the age of The Face magazine and I-D magazine. “People cared about videos and record sleeves, so it was kind of a dream job, faffing around with bands all days on photoshoots.