Revisiting my influences: GLASGOW

I’ve been talking these past few posts about influences. Place has always been a big one for me, and the first and one of the largest was where I spent a lot of time up to the age of 23.

When I was a lad, back in the early 1960s, we lived in a town 20 miles south of Glasgow, and it was an adventure to the big city when I went with my family on shopping trips. Back then the city was a Victorian giant going slowly to seed.
It is often said that the British Empire was built in Glasgow on the banks of the river Clyde. Back when I was young, the shipyards were still going strong, and the city centre itself still held on to some of its past glories.

It was a warren of tall sandstone buildings and narrow streets, with Edwardian trams still running through them. The big stores still had pneumatic delivery systems for billing, every man wore a hat, collar and tie, and steam trains ran into grand vaulted railway stations filled with smoke.

Our family trips up early on were by steam train from a station that was to be shut in the Beeching purge of the early Sixties, but my memory of the tunnel and walkway up to the platform and the sight of the train chuffing into the station billowing smoke is still clear and bright. So too are my my memories of Glasgow itself: taking the old rickety trams along Argyll Street, marveling at the pneumatic tube system in Frasers, X-raying my feet in the shoe shops and getting myself lost among a press of bodies and road traffic unheard of in the small town we’d come up from.

Glasgow became a city of firsts for me; first trip to the theatre, first bookshop, first record shop, first rock concert, first chinese meal, first curry, first pint of real ale, first place I lived after leaving home, first place where I spent time unemployed, first job after my degree, first place I sang in front of an audience with a guitar in my hand and many more.

All long in the past now of course; I left Glasgow in 1981 and never lived there again. But I’ve passed through many times and spent months on end working there in the early parts of this century, The city has changed a lot over the years.
But its heart is still the same, and the old city still sleeps there, slumbering, waiting for the stars to be right again.

The main outcome from my time in the dear green place has been my Midnight Eye books.My series character, Glasgow PI Derek Adams, is a Bogart and Chandler fan, and it is the movies and Americana of the '40s that I find a lot of my inspiration for him, rather than in the modern procedural.

The old city can be found in the places where Derek walks, in bars untouched by time, in the closes of tenement buildings that carry the memories of past glories, and in the voices of older men and women who travel through the modernity unseen, impervious to its charms.

Derek Adams, The Midnight Eye, knows the ways of the old city. And, if truth be told, he prefers them to the new.