“Tartan noir” is a handy label for everyone who wants Scottish crime to arrive pre-seasoned: a few hard men, a few hard jokes, a city painted as a bruise, and the reassuring sense that the violence belongs to somewhere else. It’s marketing dressed up as identity. It tells readers they can consume bleakness like it’s a local delicacy, then go back to their lives unchanged.
Callum McSorley doesn’t write for that comfort.
Start with what his fiction keeps dragging into the light: work. Not the picturesque graft of heritage propaganda, but the low-paid, high-shame labour that makes a city run while everyone else pretends not to see it. Squeaky Clean comes out of a car wash world he actually knows, and that matters because it refuses the genre’s favourite cheat—violence as pure spectacle, disconnected from the economy that breeds it. The grime isn’t just on the streets; it’s in the wages, the hierarchies, the small humiliations that get normalised until somebody decides to cash them in as cruelty.
McSorley’s Glasgow isn’t “gritty” as décor. It’s specific, abrasive, loud, funny in that way that’s really just rage with punchlines. The dialogue doesn’t exist to give the reader a wee tourist thrill of slang. It exists to show how people talk when they’re cornered, when they’re skint, when they’re trying to keep a shred of dignity while the system laughs at them. And the system does laugh. The city’s institutions—police, bosses, gangs, the whole greasy chain of authority—are presented as competing rackets with different uniforms.
That’s why the books bite: they don’t let you pretend crime is an exotic weather pattern. They keep pointing to the pressures underneath. The criminal world isn’t a separate underworld; it’s just the same world with fewer pretences and worse consequences.
“Tartan noir” is what publishers call it when they want you to taste the violence but not swallow the politics.
His recurring detective, Alison “Ally” McCoist, isn’t a prestige avatar for the reader to hide behind. She’s compromised, disliked, messy, and that’s the point: McSorley doesn’t hand you a morally polished guide through the filth. He makes you sit with the fact that policing in these stories isn’t a cleansing force; it’s another lever, another bargain, another place where power gets traded. That refusal of purity is what separates teeth from branding. Branding wants a hero. Teeth want a mirror.
And then there’s the humour—raw, black, relentless. The genre often uses jokes as a cushion, a way to make brutality palatable. McSorley uses jokes like a blade. The laughter doesn’t soften anything; it sharpens it. It exposes how cruelty becomes conversational, how people cope by turning horror into banter, how a city can learn to treat degradation as normal as a takeaway on a Friday night. That’s not charming. It’s diagnostic.
Readers who come to tartan noir for the kilt-and-knife routine will still get their grimy thrills, sure. But if they’re paying attention, they’ll notice something nastier: McSorley keeps tugging the story back toward the social machinery that produces “characters” like this. He doesn’t let the misery float free as entertainment. He anchors it to class, to work, to the everyday transactions that decide who gets protected and who gets spent.
The real darkness in these books isn’t the gangland stuff—it’s how quickly everyone learns to live with it.
So no, this isn’t tartan branding with a thicker coat of soot. It’s crime fiction that remembers Scotland isn’t a vibe; it’s a set of pressures, and somebody’s always paying. If you want soft-focus misery you can admire from a safe distance, go buy the label. If you want writing that bites down on the hand selling you the label, read McSorley—and don’t you dare treat the teeth as decoration.
