TWO-WAY SPLIT & KISS HER GOODBYE Allan Guthrie Polygon £6.99 ISBN: 1 904598 69 2 Polygon £8.99 ISBN: 1 904598 77 3 April 2006 Calum Macleod

A few years back someone jokingly referred to Christopher Brookmyre's books as 'Tartan noir", and the label stuck, not just for his books, but for the wave of crime writing talent that exploded out of Scotland. The problem was that many of these books, including Brookmyre's surrealistically violent farces, could not, in all honesty be labelled "noir".
Now Scotland has a writer who lives up to that tag. Lives it and breathes it. Guthrie has gone on from peddling noir in an Edinburgh bookshop to running his own website Noir Originals (well worth checking out, Shots fans), commissioning noir for PointBlank Press and above all writing it (though he did write a memorable opening to a cozy for his Bristol Left Coast Crime panel along with fellow travellers into darkness Ray Banks, Charlie Williams and Jason Starr).
Guthrie may be steeped in the hardboiled culture of the golden age of American paperback originals, but he chooses to set his own books in an Edinburgh a shade meaner, darker and dirtier than even the one explored by Rankin and Rebus.
It is a city of armed robbers, loan-sharks, sleazy private eyes and tarts with hearts, a city of guns, blades and baseball bats where kids' idea of entertainment is dropping syringe needles on passers-by from their high rise tenements.
Both books feature professional criminals and private vengeance. Debut Two-Way Split sucks the reader in immediately with an irresistible opening line:
"Four months and twenty-two days after he stopped taking his medication, Robin Greaves dragged the chair out from under the desk and sat down opposite the private investigator."
Greaves has problems. On top of a humdinger of a medical condition, he is convinced his wife is cheating on him with the partner with whom he carries out a series lucrative, but violent, post office robberies. When one of these goes wrong, Greaves becomes the target of Pearce, reluctant enforcer for a city moneylender and enthusiastic vengeance seeker when his family suffers.
Kiss Her Goodbye also features a revenge seeking hardman employed by the same loan-shark Pearce works for. University educated Joe Hope learns his daughter is dead, but regardless of whether it was suicide or accident, he needs to make somebody pay. Then a murder is committed and Joe finds himself in the frame.
In both books prose and scenes are lean and sharp, built for speed, built for excitement, with characters who immediately make an impact as forceful as a baseball bat through a car windscreen.
Just like those old Gold Medal paperbacks, once you crack the spine, you're caught up in the action and you are off on a thrill ride. If there is a weak point to the books, the endings could do with more work. In the first Greaves' medical condition gets things overly complicated while the second involves a credibility stretching sting, but by the time you get there you will be too caught up to care.
Guthrie's writing is evolving, as Kiss Her Goodbye with its more intricate plot, mystery element and more substantial back story shows. Expectations for this young writer will remain high until proved different.