You think you’ve had a bad day at work? At least your boss won’t remove your kneecaps if you screw up. And you’ve never had to clean out your industrial shredder after something that wasn’t just paper has gone through it – and we’re not talking staples. You’ve (probably) never been in receipt of a huge amount of cocaine you’re supposed to sell just as the COVID lockdown kicks in.

All are incidents that befall the hapless characters of my ‘Squeaky Clean’ crime thriller trilogy set in Glasgow.

Over the course of the trilogy, I’ve been keen to look at characters unwillingly pulled into the criminal underworld. People on the fringes of that life who are vulnerable to coercion. In SQUEAKY CLEAN, car wash worker Davey ends up owing gang lord Paulo McGuinn hundreds of thousands of pounds because he wrecks the Big Man’s car. Unable to pay it back, he ends up cleaning more than just cars for Paulo. In PAPERBOY, confidential waste technician Chuck’s gambling addiction sees him get himself further into debt with progressively shadier characters. In final book RAT RACE (out in May) Fran returns to a life of crime he left behind years before for one last job. For all three, livelihoods and lives are on the line.

This is the same for my returning series detective, Alison ‘Ally’ McCoist.

The McOrigins of McCoist

SQUEAKY CLEAN started life as a 25k word novella called VALET (pronounced the Glaswegian way – rhymes with ‘mallet’ – it inevitably changed). It was mostly about the above-mentioned car wash worker Davey trying to extricate himself from the clutches of the evil, and obnoxious, Paulo. But about two thirds of the way in a detective – DI McCoist – stoats along, looking to dig herself out of the unspecified disgrace she is currently wallowing in. She largely makes everything worse, The End.

It was sent out to publishers, with Pushkin Press returning to say they’d like to see me develop it into a novel. So it would have to grow sixty-odd thousand words. I began by looking at my characters and seeing who had more to give. McCoist was the obvious top choice. And the obvious first question: why is she in disgrace?

This one question began a three-book-long study of her shifting morality as she weathers the push and pull of justice and corruption, what is right and what is honest, led this way and that by a crooked superintendent and her own modest self-interests: don’t get fired; don’t get jailed; don’t die.

McCoist also has a family, teenage twins Cam and Tess, who she sees on weekends if work allows. They have their own dramas, and their safety becomes a constant stress for McCoist as she is dragged deeper into the world of organised crime. How close she should hold them is something she’s always swithering about – and, deep down, she worries she’s just not a good parent, gangster problems or not.  (Projection of the author’s own personal fears? Was Larkin right?)

She’s a bit of a loner. Her mardy attitude doesn’t endear her to people. Her colleagues are wary because of her reputation. And true, she’s also not the world’s best cop, but she is dogged and courageous – not in the brave and noble knight way but in the way that she carries on even when (rightly) terrified – and genuinely tries her best for people, even when her efforts are not appreciated.

I’ve been asked before in an interview if I ‘like’ McCoist – considering all the shite I put her through and the less than polite ways she is often described by other characters who encounter her. And I have to say I do. I like her sense of humour and acidic put-downs, I like her dedication to awful coffee, and I like the reckless impulsiveness that overtakes her in moments of frustration or desperation (e.g. in SQUEAKY CLEAN she steals a dog from a puppy mill she’s supposed to be shutting down as  last minute Christmas present for the weans). She’s been enormous fun to write about, flaws and all. Putting the finishing touches to book three and sending it off was a bittersweet moment.

In RAT RACE, McCoist is on the trail of marathon runner and former drug dealer Francesco Forbes, who’s gotten in way over his head after agreeing to do one final job which goes horribly wrong as soon as the starting pistol goes off (not being entirely figurative here). If there’s anyone who can help him now, it’s Ally McCoist.

What’s in a name?

For anyone in Scotland – and possibly beyond – the name McCoist is synonymous with footballer turned pundit Ally McCoist, a star goalscorer for Rangers Football Club in the nineties. This comes up in the novel quite a bit, especially as Inspector McCoist’s first name is Alison.

I first used it as a placeholder. I needed a name while I was writing my first draft and it popped into my head. More specifically, the name of an old Rangers-daft schoolmate’s pet goldfish – Coisty – popped into my head.

I stuck it in, thinking I might change it at some point, but then quite liked the way other characters would react to it, specifically, the irritation it caused the detective. Also, Ally McCoist (real one) is from East Kilbride, where I’m from, and my grandma was a huge fan of his, and I quite liked all these links. So it stayed, and now the man himself is aware of it. In a video message recorded for my event at Helensburgh Book Festival in 2025 (a lovely surprise) he said of all the things he thought he might be growing up, police detective was not one of them.

I took this as his blessing to keep on going, though with RAT RACE being the last of the trilogy, both Ally McCoists can get a bit of peace from me.