The Storm Without (the first Doug Michie crime thriller) [Kindle Edition]

Tony Black's book `The Storm Without' takes a slight deviation from the police procedurals he's been releasing of late.
It's tells the story of a man returning to his home town of Ayr, having made decisions in the past that leave him unsure of his direction in life.

As he arrives in the town, he sees a familiar face, that of an ex-girlfriend. She's waiting at the bus stop, so he pulls over to offer her a lift. The old chemistry hasn't completely gone and they end up going for coffee. Turns out her son is being charged for murder and that he needs some help to prove his innocence.

The good news is that our man Doug Michie is a seasoned hard-man who has spent time in Ulster working for the RUC in Belfast. It means that when the trail leads him to some powerful and dangerous people, he's not entirely out of his depth.

There are many things in this book that will seem familiar to fans of lone-wolf detectives and private-investigators. These will make you feel very much at home. You may get whiffs of Ken Bruen or fleeting moments of déjà vu from older stories.

How then, does Black make his character stand out from the rest?

Michie is partial to Robbie Burns. He knows his work and likes to quote him from time-to-time to illustrate his thinking. He's also a guy who pays attention to the world and will use the things he remembers to illustrate his points. And he's a pretty reflective sort, finding that returning to his home town raises questions about his life, his value to the world and his mortality.

It's also slightly different in that this was first released in serial form. This has some impact on the style and means that new chapters occasionally revisit previous ones to make sure the reader is clear about where they are in the story.

Telling a story in the first person isn't an easy thing; Tony Black pretty much gets the balance of introspection and action right.

`The Storm Without' is another example of Black's talent and it's a rather pleasing tale. If you're short of holiday reading this summer, this book will certainly help to fill the hole.

A fine addition to the Blasted Heath collection.

First of all, I've got a confession to make, I'm not from Ayr, I'm from Kilmarnock and if you know anything about Ayrshire, where Tony Black's angst riven new novel is set, then you will be aware of the bitter rivalry between the two towns. If we're talking football, then Kilmarnock easily comes out top; industry, then Kilmarnock used to win hands down but if it was an ice-cream cone you were after then Ayr was your place.

Days have changed though for both of these proud towns. Industry has all but vanished from Kilmarnock and the gloss of Ayr as a holiday destination is certainly now very ragged around the edges.

In The Storm Without, Black examines the demise of a once proud town, home of the greatest poet the world has ever known, Robert Burns. Seen through the eyes of Doug Michie, a police officer just returned to his home town after many years in Northern Ireland, the town that he once knew has all but vanished, leaving only a ghost-like trace of the bustling market town of his memories.

It's not only the town that Michie finds has degenerated in his absence, but the good people of Ayr themselves, as fake now as the cheap cigarettes, corrupt and soulless where the murder of a young girl can easily be blamed on an innocent boy and his own mother seeks oblivion in the bottom of a bottle.

In one sense, the portrait painted of Ayr by Michie is accurate; both Ayr and Kilmarnock have suffered since the early seventies at the hands of town planners who have ripped the old heart out of both towns, creating concrete pedestrian precincts and encouraging huge out of town supermarkets, but Michie is also a damaged man, wishing that he had pulled the trigger on corruption when he'd had the opportunity but instead, allowed those in positions of power to throw him to the dogs. Michie is always looking backwards, to his lost love, to the mother he once knew and the town he grew up in. But nothing lasts forever and the familiar home that Michie had sentimentalised in his own mind perhaps never really existed either.

It should not be a shock to Michie that smuggling is rife in the town as this has always been the case, even in the time of Burns, who was an excise man as well as a farmer. The gloom that overwhelms Michie is also not a new factor, the human spirit in Ayrshire has always mirrored the weather; mostly gloomy and pessimistic, even on the most stunning summer day. Life has always been tough in the town with a mixture of boozers, chancers and Holy Willies, you only need to read Burns' poetry to know that.

Black has done a grand job of bringing together the setting and the characteristics of the people within the structure of a crime novel, quoting Burns to great effect, linking past with present.

Michie is no doubt one of the gloomiest characters I've ever met in a novel and I love that as much as a pig loves wallowing in a big muddy puddle, luxuriating in the muck and darkness that Scottish literature portrays so well from Burns to Hogg or Guthie. I look forward to meeting Michie again and I sincerely hope that he hasn't cheered up - fat chance of that!

This book is so short! To me, it is a sketchy first draft that is missing all the padding that builds a story up. An easy read in an afternoon and evening.

On researching further, I did discover that this was first serialised in a Scottish newspaper, which accounts for its' shortcomings, and, on further research, I find a whole host of full length Tony Black novels which beckon seductively - because I do like the gritty realism of crime novels based in Scotland, and this west coast setting is as dreich and dark as it gets.

So, from my point of view, not a massively brilliant read in itself - but a good introduction to Tony Black.