Roddy Lumsden Reviews Blood and Granite

One of the subjects I studied at university was Scottish Ethnology. I remember one morning, the late Hamish Henderson was giving us a lecture on the North East of Scotland, its people's characteristics, dialects and so on. He touched on the notorious murderer Dennis Nielsen, who was from Fraserburgh. He wondered if certain aspects of the character and social framework of people of that region might encourage a certain repressed psychology which in some individuals might lead them on to criminality.

Blood and Granite

I had this in mind when reading Blood and Granite – True Crime from Aberdeen by veteran Aberdeen journalist Norman Adams which has recently been reissued by Black and White. It's been a while since I've written on true crime books here, but I often come back to them – first because I'm drawn to them, that mix of psychology, procedure and prurient detail – and also because it is a genre that has thrived in Scottish publishing in recent years. We do this stuff well.

So, do any theories emerge from the book? Certainly these murders, at least until the appearance of heroin in the mid-80s (when the global callousness of hard drugs emerges), seem broadly different from those in similar collections I have read about Glasgow, Newcastle and London. There are bleak, black characters, a certain sense of random, pent-up aggression spilling loose, secrets emerging in darkness.

Sadly, some of Aberdeen's most notorious crimes have been child murders. In 1934, Jeannie Donald is thought to have shaken her neighbour's daughter, who had been cheeky. Sadly, the child had a medical condition and fainted. Thinking she had strangled the girl, Mrs Donald inflicted horrible injuries on the child to simulate rape, but the child was still alive so, in a panic, she did strangle her. Sentenced to hang, she actually served less than ten years.

Then there are the impulse crimes – a man stabbed in a pub toilet seemingly because the criminal couldn't resist the large knife he had acquired; a woman strangled with shoelaces by a man she had been drinking and quietly sunbathing with; a man whose head is blown off by his wife's obsessive lover, who has nil chance of getting away with it.

Norman Adams covered criminal cases for decades and has selected here some of the most shocking and intriguing (including a few which remain unsolved), as well as some cases from before his time as a reporter. This is a well-written book of its kind, not too salacious, not too judgemental. True crime fans who missed the original edition should get hold of it.

Gangs of Glasgow

Also reissued by Black and White, Robert Jeffrey's Gangs of Glasgow looks at a century and more of the organised chaos we associate with the no mean city. This is the third or fourth true crime volume I have read by one of Scotland's leading writers in the genre, a Glasgow specialist. I wrote about two of them here previously, and much of the material here is familiar from his other books. However, this is a more in-depth, more sociologically-focussed book than his others, with interesting background and social history (the mistakes made with Easterhouse, the world of undercover infiltration) to put the crimes of the razor gangs and the godfathers into perspective.

And there is certainly a good reason for updating this book, with the death last year of Thomas McGraw, aka The Licensee, one of the main players in recent decades. A new last chapter looks at the current situation in the light of that news and the attempts by the authorities to stop organised crime, though as has been noted before, for some the lack of central crimelords might make for a worse situation, with many smaller gangs leading to more violence, and the crime that will result from increased drug prices and competition. Gangs of Glasgow has the sort of context and contemplation you don't often find in the true crime genre – it's a strong piece of work.