The Death of Remembrance
Denzil Meyrick
Polygon, £8.99
The Death of Remembrance comes at an auspicious time, marking the passing of a full decade since the inaugural appearance of DCI Jim Daley in Denzil Meyrick’s first novel, Whisky from Small Glasses, and preceding Daley’s imminent TV debut, played by Game of Thrones’ Rory McCann. The story of the working-class Glasgow copper based in the west coast fishing town of Kinloch has advanced at the rate of a novel per year since 2012, with additional short stories filling out the backstories of the main characters, and Meyrick has built up a substantial following along with his reputation as one of Scotland’s best crime writers.
Fittingly, the tenth anniversary novel has a weightiness to it, an atmosphere of foreboding – and, in its many flashbacks to Glasgow in the 1970s and 1980s, the sense that in his characters’ pasts lie the seeds of their eventual downfall. Daley’s loyal sidekick, the equally old-school Brian Scott, even asks at one point, “Do you ever get the feeling o’ things coming to an end, Jimmy?”
The sombre mood is personified by Hugh Machie, father of the crime boss James Machie, killed by Scott some years earlier. Old and terminally ill, Machie has arrived in Kinloch with a pistol, his life reduced to a handful of fading photographs, determined to settle some scores before he dies.
And the men he’s come here to confront are no longer at the height of their powers. Scott is letting his fondness for drink get the better of him, to the extent that his career in the police may be over. Daley, described by a younger officer, DS Shreya Dhar, as “a man of high principles who thought nothing of beating his wife’s attacker half to death. A risk-averse senior officer who actively sought out the assistance of DS Brian Scott, a police officer who’d broken almost every rule there was to break” is looking more and more like an anachronism who’s nearing the end of his road. Both men’s marriages have soured, and the price they’ve paid for their actions over the years weighs heavily on their shoulders.
After nine previous dark and gritty instalments, this beaten, elegiac tone feels like the perfect note to strike, its air of finality ensuring that Meyrick’s readers can’t be sure that this time their heroes will make it out in one piece.
To fully appreciate it, it would help to have read the full series, or at least the previous book, which featured the death of one major character and introduced another, the Canadian Ian Macmillan who has taken over Kinloch’s County Hotel. Secretly, he’s at the beck and call of a London gangster who plans to use the hotel as a safe haven for criminals to lie low until a boat can pick them up. New character Shreyda Dhar is transferred to Kinloch from Glasgow, ostensibly to fill in for Brian Scott, who has been suspended for drunkenly kicking off in a bar, though really to gather information on Macmillan. But the hotelier will have to wait, as Hugh Machie is ready to play his hand.
It’s not flawless. The tragicomic dinner-party set-piece where the couples’ domestic tension comes to a head misses the mark, the jokes based on Brian Scott’s limited vocabulary outstay their welcome and the nods to the supernatural that crop up near the end jar with the overall tone. But our investment in the characters pays off, and Meyrick’s ability to keep the pages turning almost of their own accord marks the Death of Remembrance as top-drawer crime fiction.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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