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AS readers would expect, I
have a large circle of like-minded friends such as retired rear
admirals, brain surgeons, journalists, beggarmen and thieves. With the
last, I have had a nodding acquaintance as one recognising ham actors on
the stage of criminal life.
Covering the law courts as a young reporter, I saw these light-fingered
citizens, whose hands flickered over shop-counters, into people’s
pockets and the cash and cosmetics’ cornucopia of handbags, collared in
the dock with hang-dog expressions and charged with nefarious
activities.
On that press bench basis, I also met freelance swindlers, spasmodic
street brawlers, illegal tender utterers, domestic assault and battery
practitioners and in the kaleidoscope of Edin-burgh’s anti-social
activities, ancient, be-shawled beldames of Belial who admitted drunk
and disorderly behaviour, some of them achieving over 100 court
appearances.
Once, I bumped into a man acquitted of murder who tried to criticise my
report of his trial. Naturally, I cut him dead.
These days were recalled by two books I have been reading: McLevy, The
Edinburgh Detective and McLevy Returns - published by Mercat Press, once
an adjunct of the former Edinburgh booksellers, James Thin, and now an
independent company.
James McLevy, born at Ballymacnab in County Armagh, was a builder’s
labourer before joining the police. He became a detective in 1833,
handled 2,220 cases during his 30-years career and nearly always got a
conviction. He published several popular books in the 1860s about his
experiences that were almost forgotten until Mercat Press published the
first selection of his writings two years ago.
McLevy’s Edinburgh was not markedly different from the city I knew as a
child in the 1930s with its Old Town, in some parts, a labyrinthine,
decaying collection of fetid tenements, noisome wynds and dark, dank
passageways, where ragged children ran, families lived in a poverty
unimaginable even to today’s low wage earners, and youngsters like me
were warned not to enter certain streets lest we were molested by
tough-egg toddlers, picked up contagious afflictions or worse, heard
labial-fricative swear-words
Edinburgh, birthplace of the Enlightenment, was, in the 1830s, a city of
free and often desperate enterprise, and Mc-Levy knew the Old Town
especi-ally like the back of his baton-holding hand. Here, he reveals,
was a confusion of dark dens in now vanished tenements. One, cynically
dubbed "the happy land", was crammed with "thieves, robbers,
pickpockets, abandoned women, drunken destitutes and their
chance-begotten brats - a place of swearing, fights, drunken brawls and
cruelties." Considering the social run-down in parts of today’s city,
little has changed.
McLevy’s eye was all-seeing. He strode his world like a Nemesis in
detective-sized boots with the assurance of one who recognised pimps,
prostitutes and pilferers at a glance. A stair whisper, heard by chance,
led him to solve a crime and the intriguing case of the bloodstained
moleskin was, like many others, concluded satisfactorily by acute
observation, patient detective work, luck and his ability "to be about
the right place at the right time". We need more like him pounding the
watchful beat on today’s streets.
His arresting tales have a mildly, moralising tone, relieved by flashes
of humour. It seems likely that when McLevy was on the beat, criminals
beat it up stairheads and piled ill-gotten furniture against their front
door.
Impressed by McLevy’s origi-nal books, discovered when researching for
an Open University PhD on early policing in Scotland, John McGowan, a
former detective superintendent in Lothians and Borders Police and now
British Energy’s security manager, donated the James McLevy Trophy to
his old force, three years ago, to be presented to individuals or units
for outstanding achievement in crime detection. The present cup holders
are the Craigmillar Crime Patrol.
The spirit of McLevy lives on - certainly in the publishing world. Ian
Rankin’s Inspector John Rebus is flourishing and Mercat Press is
reprinting a book on the once highly-popular, fictional reminiscences of
a Victorian detective, published 20 years after McLevy’s memoirs,
entitled, The McGovan Casebook by James McGovan, the pen-name of William
Crawford Honeyman, a professional violinist and writer in tune with
underworld Edinburgh.
The city is lucrative turf for the detective story gang. It would be a
publishing crime not to exploit it. I can’t wait to turn the next
enjoyably-fearful pages. |
