Glasgow Crime

These are the words of weel-kent Glasgow defence lawyer Joe Beltrami, featured in Blood On the Streets – An A-Z of Glasgow Crime, rubbishing the idea that Glasgow suffers from organised crime. Organised or not, there is plenty of crime and in recent years, crime writers have certainly been organising their casebooks for the pleasure of a prurient public, rounding up former villains and ex-cops alike to regale us with their no mean tales.

Is Glasgow a special case? There are other tough cities in the UK like Manchester and Nottingham, but perhaps only Glasgow rivals London's East End for the way its criminal history swaggers hand in hand with nostalgia and a sort of gritty glamour. A list of Glasgow gang names in Robert Jeffrey's Blood On the Streets makes for a grimly poetic litany: Black Diamond Boys, Cheeky Forty, Crossy Posse, Gold Dust Gang, Kill Me Deads, Lollipops, Mummies, Toon Tongs, Wee Mob, Yoker Toi (there are dozens more). It's poetry with razors and baseball bats, but poetry nonetheless. Perhaps not baseball bats nowadays though – apparently the blunt instrument of choice in recent years is increasingly a golf club – a much less obtrusive weapon to be found in a car boot!

Should we believe Beltrami when he says there are no Sopranos-style godfathers? Certainly, there is nothing like the structure of American or Italian Mafia style crime. Yet Walter Norval, Arthur Thompson, Paul Ferris, Thomas McGraw – these were and are men who had significant power within the city, though if we are to believe the rumour Robert Jeffrey reports, the latter pair – long sworn enemies - have now gone to the strange lengths of signing legal papers which will forfeit their businesses to the other's associates should one do away with the other. Meanwhile, Ferris is said to have gone straight, and McGraw, or The Licensee as he is known, is spending more of his time and money in sunny Tenerife.

As well as looking at the gangsters from recent decades, Blood On the Streets does a fine job giving accounts of some of the city's best-known crime cases from history, including those of Oscar Slater and Jessie McLachlan, both wrongly sentenced to hang (both served lengthy prison terms instead). Celebrated policemen, journalists and lawyers are also featured. There are long pieces on Peter Manuel, the '50s menace who killed eight, probably more, and Bible John, the city's bogeyman.

Did Bible John exist? Jeffrey quotes a trusted underground source as saying that one man (since killed in a gang feud) was responsible for the three dance-hall murders, but on balance he believes there were at least two killers at work. This view is shared by Les Brown in Real Hard Cases (co-authored with Jeffrey). Brown, a former detective who later investigated suspected miscarriages of justice, believes the character (and his rather dashing identikit picture) acquired such a folkloric significance in the city that it hampered the criminal investigation.

Brown does feel that one of Scotland's other enduring criminal mysteries may soon be solved though, that being the 1976 disappearance of Renee MacRae and her young son. He relates that just this Autumn, a local farmer with a strong interest in the case has engaged specialists who have detected unexplained objects beneath the A9, at a place where it was reported that a construction site had been tampered with at the time of the disappearance, near to where MacRae's burnt car was found.

Elsewhere in Real Hard Cases, Brown reports on cases he worked on or those which have gone unsolved or where a miscarriage of justice seems likely. As someone who has been a policeman, and has battled against what he sees as wrongful convictions, he has an interesting insight into criminal procedure. There are some intriguing cases picked over, including that of the murdered teenager Pamela Hastie in 1981. Though other evidence points against it, a witness is convinced a man seen running near the murder scene, and who collided with his vehicle, was serial murderer Robert Black, then unknown to the police.

A new collection of Glasgow true crime, Murder Capital, sees Reg McKay pore over mostly recent cases. It is divided into nasty categories - Thrill Killers, Femmes Fatales and so on. Yet these sensational phrases often mask situations of almost mundane cruelty and disregard, borne of poverty, greed and especially drugs. We hear of two brothers who by their mid-teens had attained such an unbelievable reign of fear over a large estate that it was only a matter of time till there was deadly revenge. In the meantime, an awful stalemate occurred, with authorities and police failing to control the boys. Meanwhile, In Ibrox, a young man not much older had grown so obsessed with gangster films that he began to act out the violence, soon executing a young relative, a crime he was never going to get away with, not since he quickly began boasting about the killing.

In fact, any Glaswegian who sees the slightest tinge of glamour in street gangs, 'men of honour' and their 'friends' with quirky nicknames, in silk ties and sharp suits, should read this dispiriting collection, since it's largely time which puts a spin on these things – films and novels have softened the edges of the razor, have blown fog around the bludgeonings in gaslit back streets.

Yet, things are undoubtedly worse today. Sex cases, thefts and extortion are nothing new, but the increasing drug culture has exacerbated every criminal activity. Intoxicating substances are laced liberally throughout the tales of death in this book, from the stoned teen taking potshots from his bedroom to the tanked up gangs, junkie muggers and murdered crack-stung prostitutes.

The unpredictability of those on drugs is frightening and McKay paints a picture of a city more used to self-contained 'bam on bam' violence drifting into the abyss of random cruelty and altered reality, as drugs become the central concern of organised criminals or, probably worse, many smaller groups of criminals who are competing to flood the market with cheaper, more deadly substances. Murder Capital is a chilling read.