Why a Booktrail?
2000s: NOMINATED FOR THE MCILVANNY PRIZE SCOTTISH CRIME BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016
Open Wounds (Davie McCall 4)
What you need to know before your trail
Davie McCall is tired. Tired of a lot of things. Violence is right up there on the list but so too is life itself. He’s not normally bothered about the violence, well you get that used to something it starts to become run of the mill. But Davie has started to enjoy it all a bit.
Davie wants out, but the underbelly of Glasgow is all he has ever known. Will what he learns about his old ally Big Rab McClymont be enough to get him out of the Life? Or is this the life he is destined to live as you’re more likely to die than get out alive?
Travel Guide
This visit to Glasgow starts with a funeral and it only gets darker. Funerals in the sun didn’t feel right’ we’re told in the opening line
This is the Glasgow where a woman called Old Jinty has white milky legs with varicose veins that rose from her calves like a relief map of the Pyrenees.
Already the gritty and bleak details is starting to flood in and that’s before the setting comes into play
The book is set firmly in Glasgow gangster culture and everything that that entails. The streets and parks in Glasgow become patches and stomping grounds on a battle being fought and lost on all scores
Also setting the scene is the unique and incomprehensible to some outsiders – Glaswegian vernacular and accent sings from every page. Gallows and gangster humour. You can hear and feel every word, every Glaswegian roll of the tongue.
Douglas Skelton doesn’t just take you around Glasgow, he shoves you straight into the action and drags you around by the scruff of your neck. This is Glasgow seen through the eyes of the gangsters who inhabit its dark alleys and its seedy underbelly.
Glasgow Skelton style is not just a city, it’s a world, a life, an experience.
Streetview Maps
C) Glasgow - Sword Street
E) Glasgow - Tolbooth Steeple
Booktrailer Review
Clare: @thebooktrailer
Have you read any of Douglas Skelton’s work? If not why not? It’s more Glaswegian than Glasgow itself. They’re novels which has so much of the city’s streets, nuances, Glasgow vernacular and darkness inside of them that it’s now hard for me to think of Glasgow without wanting to read these books again. This one, open wounds is the last in the series and an apt title for me as quite frankly I’m going to feel a bit bereft. Not that this is the Glasgow I’d actually want to visit – the real one is far nicer! But it’s the whole package for me – the wit, the way that Skelton makes me care about a gangster’s right hand man. I mean I normally hate violence and violent people but Davie has just stuck in my mind.
Open Wounds has a lot to it – hidden secrets, past agendas and a corrupt policeman who wants Davie to shut up. There is, as you will probably gather, a great deal of violence in this book and it felt like a punch in the stomach on more than one occasion. I felt all worked up at the end, churned up even and many points I found disturbing.
But on the whole it was disturbingly good and Skelton’s Glasgow is one heck of a booktrail!
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: Open Wounds (Davie McCall 4)
Author/ Guide: Douglas Skelton Destination: Glasgow Departure Time: 1990s
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