By Dennis Drabelle, Special to The Washington Post
Two years ago, in his Glasgow Trilogy, Malcolm Mackay plunged readers into the world of hit men employed by a Scottish mob, where paranoia is a way of life. A lad can’t be too careful to make sure he’s not being tailed, to scout out the best escape route from any building he enters, and to keep his eye on the line between a job going well and a job going too well to be credible. The trilogy was a bravura performance, and one had every reason to expect that Mackay would do more with such rich material.
That expectation has now been met, and rousingly so. In Mackay’s latest novel, “Every Night I Dream of Hell,” Calum MacLean, the appealing freelance killer who anchored the trilogy, is gone – but several other characters are still around, notably Peter Jamieson, who continues to run the city’s top gang, although from behind bars.
This time our first-person narrator is 37-year-old Nate Colgan, not a full-fledged hit man (he has yet to kill anyone as the book gets underway), but a one-man show of force, whose mere presence can unnerve even his colleagues. That’s because, if he must, Nate will back up his emotionless stare with a punishing pair of fists. He’s well aware, however, that his professional skill set is a private liability. “I would have liked to have a woman in my life,” he confesses, “but that wasn’t happening. … I was short-tempered, generally surly, and lugging around a reputation that made me good at my job and bad at everything else.” Later Nate cites an additional, darker reason for abjuring female companionship: “You care a damn about a woman then you keep her as far away from this life as possible.”
Nate has previously worked for the Jamieson organization ad hoc, but as the story opens he goes on the payroll as its “security consultant.” If that title sounds bureaucratic, it’s supposed to. Mackay portrays organized crime as so enamored of hierarchy and meetings that one can almost imagine the gang going off on a retreat, with pastries and facilitators.
Nate knows that his hiring sends a message to rival groups both outside and inside the Jamieson gang: Do not mistake the boss’ incarceration for an opportunity to stage a coup. Nate’s job gets harder when a distraction named Zara Cope re-enters his life. Besides being the mother of Nate’s pre-teen daughter (whom Zara wants nothing to do with), she is the one person who can get under Nate’s skin. Beautiful, canny and manipulative, she makes him simultaneously want to have her, protect her and avoid her. Zara’s resurfacing only compounds what may be – as Mackay’s title suggests – Nate’s salient weakness: his chronic lack of sleep. “I was exhausted,” he admits at one point, “and exhaustion was going to push me into making mistakes.”
As gangs and factions make moves and countermoves, Mackay provides sardonic insights into the thuggish life. Regarding one gangster’s impulse to do “something big” so as not to appear weak, Nate observes, “Yeah, they always think they have to be seen doing something big. …” Speaking of seeing, Nate says this about his not-what-it-used-to-be eyesight: “It’ll have to stay below its best because a guy like me doesn’t turn up to his work bespectacled.” And here’s a candidate for the ultimate tough-guy line, delivered as Nate is using those fists of his on an in-house traitor. “Doesn’t matter how many skulls you hit, there’s still a little shoot of pain.” The only time Nate’s rough eloquence fails him is when he philosophizes on why he turned to crime in the first place. His explanation – he had seen too many men in his family work themselves to the bone and hit age 50 with their health ruined and nothing to show for it — seems a bit pat.
The novel climaxes with a virtuosic burst of cross-cutting chapters — from a police raid to a hit job in progress. The front matter of “Every Night I Dream of Hell” includes a dramatis personae that runs to 40-odd entries. Not all of these will reach the end of the book alive, but by my count Malcolm Mackay has left himself with more than enough players to justify further visits to (paraphrasing William Faulkner) his own little postage stamp of soil.
Every Night I Dream of Hell
By Malcolm Mackay
Mulholland.
Dennis Drabelle is a former mysteries editor of The Washington Post Book World.
