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No Smoke
 
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No Smoke (Paperback)

by Hugh Collins (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 256 pages
  • Publisher: Canongate Crime (6 Jul 2001)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1841951161
  • ISBN-13: 978-1841951164
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 13 x 1.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 329,631 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Product Description

Product Description

Glasgow, 1976. Jake McGinty and his gang are running around town, drinking, fighting and getting involved in all sorts of minor criminal activity. Then a scam goes wrong and dead bodies start to pile up. The police are quick to try to pin it on Jake - but are the real suspects closer to home?


From the Back Cover

'Hugh Collins creates entertaingly devious characters and then mercilessly dispatches them, leaving the reader to mourn them as long as it takes for the next vicarious thrill to come along. No Smoke is a Glaswegian Goodfellas, with its vertiginous buzz accentuated by a steadfastly unjudgemental narrative voice.' Christopher Brookmyre

This is Hugh Collins' first foray into fiction. No Smoke is the first part of a trilogy set in the Glasgow underworld that will span twenty years - chronicling the changing fashions, politics and innumerable scams and wrong-doings.

In his autobiographical work Hugh Collins demonstrated a rare flair for dialogue and vernacular. And this novel brims with Glasgow patter that is utterly authentic - hilarious and dangerous.

Barney is an old scammer - a gentlemn outlaw who's roped in a coupld of younger hoodlums who are prepared to use extreme violence at the slightest hint of trouble. Jake and Skud are helping Barney pull a fast one on two Pakistani brothers. Only, the brothers are scamming too - fobbing Barney and his boys off with forged notes.

Celebrating their success in the infamous Woodside Inn, Barney and Jake's lecherous attitude and flamboyant spending arouse the suspicion of the bar manager - an ex-copper. Before he knows it, Barney is sitting with an untouched pint and two seriously assaulted 'Untouchables' from the Strathclyde police - while Jake and Skud, still armed, are now on the run.

In the meantime, Rashid the younger of the brothers has been picked up by the 'Untouchables' and has been beaten to death in a police cell ... but by who?

With consummate plotting, a host of brilliantly drawn rogues and an uncanny sense of pacing, No Smoke is set to do for Glasgow what Ian Rankin did for Edinburgh.

Only, unlike Rankin and the majority of crime writers, Hugh Collins knows the territory he's talking about.


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Customer Reviews

2 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Misinformed miscreants in murder maelstrom, 12 Mar 2002
By adrian@lewisand.co.uk (Poole, Dorset ,UK) - See all my reviews
Hugh Collins' first novel is a rattling story - pacy, poignant and thought-provoking from its quasi-humorous beginning to its philosophical epilogue. It is set in 1976, at the end of a 'golden' era of criminality in Glasgow (as one of the main characters, Barney Boone, sees it), a time when criminals and police knew what to expect from each other.

The tale opens with Barney and his gang in a botched skirmish with another gang, one of whose members ends up in custody - and ,later, dead. Barney had been picked up by the two tough detectives, but is inexplicably released. Mutterings of 'grass' rise further when another of Barney's mob, Jake, is nearly arrested following the knifing of Karen, the landlady of the 'Woodside'. Others become sucked into the maelstrom and the black humour deepens as the gang members become more desperate in their attempts to work out really what happened and set out to settle scores.

The reader is assualted by images of a crude, violent and nihilistic society, whose only morality - at the centre of the story - is not to 'grass' or 'chib' women. Lighter moments are sparse, and the street philosophy for which Glasgow is renowned is in very short supply. Barney is no Rab C Nesbitt - there is very little underlying humanity anywhere in the book - no lovabale rascal. An emotional roller coaster for the reader comes to an end with a feeling of some optimism as the just desserts are meted out by fate. There could even be a hint of redemption.

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0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars In the jailhouses of Scotland, 16 Jul 2001
By A Customer
If you've ever read the Marabou Stork Nightmares, Ecstacy, Trainspotting or anything else by Irvine Welsh, then you've already read No Smoke. Working class men with no jobs who aren't averse to narcotics, crime and violence, surviving on the streets of Scotland, complete with the Glaswegian accents. You would think Collins, a convicted murderer might have something more original to note about police brutality and the prison system in this, his first novel. But if tales of street fights, steak knives and LSD have yet to bore, it's a cutting and often funny book with a surging plot. Smokers should find the front cover irresistible.
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