There’s a lazy story the industry loves: poet discovers crime fiction, swaps the small magazine circuit for bigger shelves, learns to “plot,” and suddenly becomes marketable. It flatters everyone involved. The poet gets upgraded. The crime reader gets to feel discerning. Publishing gets to pretend it’s discovered a new kind of grit. Michael J Malone doesn’t fit that tidy arc, and the people who keep trying to wedge him into it are missing the point.
Malone’s poetry background isn’t a cute origin story; it’s a pressure system. You can feel it in the way his prose refuses to loaf around. Scenes don’t wander for atmosphere. Dialogue arrives sharpened. The best lines land like they’ve been cut down to bone, because they have. That’s what a working poet learns: don’t waste the reader’s oxygen. In crime, that discipline becomes something harsher. Not elegance. Control.
His early crime work doesn’t pose Glasgow as a “darkly glamorous” playground. It treats the city like a machine that grinds people down and then asks them to thank it for the character-building. The DI Ray McBain novels come out of that tradition—tartan noir, sure, but without the tartan cosplay. McBain is a detective with underworld proximity that isn’t romantic, just compromising. That compromise is the engine. It’s also the point: in real cities, the clean hands are usually the ones farthest from the consequences.
Then there’s Malone’s knack for making “crime terrain” feel like more than a backdrop. He doesn’t just drop bodies into alleys and call it social commentary. He pays attention to who gets treated as disposable and how quickly everyone adapts to it. In A Taste for Malice, the threat isn’t a theatrical monster; it’s a person who exploits the roles society is trained to trust. In Beyond the Rage, he centres Kenny O’Neill—criminal, yes, but also a product of abandonment, class damage, and the kind of masculinity that treats tenderness as a humiliation. Malone writes that without pleading for sympathy, and without letting the reader sneak off with easy hatred. The system’s fingerprints stay on the weapon.
“Catharsis” is what crime readers call it when they want violence to tidy their feelings; Malone’s best work keeps the mess where it belongs, in the room with us.
Bad Samaritan pushes the series into uglier contemporary nerves—surveillance, cyberstalking, the way obsession scales when technology hands it power. And threaded through it is that grim refusal to pretend trauma is a one-off event with a neat recovery arc. You don’t “solve” certain kinds of damage. You just live around it, and you watch who profits from everyone else pretending it’s over.
What makes Malone’s evolution interesting is that he doesn’t stay obedient to the crime lane. The Guillotine Choice—co-written with Bashir Saoudi—goes historical, built around a true story of incarceration and endurance in one of history’s brutal penal systems. That move matters because it shows where his instincts really sit: not in genre comfort, but in pressure, confinement, and the moral accounting of power. It’s still “crime terrain,” but widened—colonial violence, institutional cruelty, dignity under siege.
And then A Suitable Lie arrives as a so-called departure: domestic noir, psychological thriller, marriage as a trap with the locks on the inside. This is where a lot of crime writers either soften or sensationalise. They lean into the twisty funhouse and forget the human cost, or they stage suffering as entertainment with a tasteful soundtrack. Malone doesn’t. He writes intimacy as a site of coercion and denial, where the public face of “normal” becomes the perfect hiding place. The horror isn’t exotic. It’s socially sanctioned.
The through-line from poems to crime isn’t that he’s become more “accessible.” It’s that he’s become more ruthless about what he’ll force a reader to face. The poems trained him to compress. The crime books let him expand the blast radius. And the cultural appetite for “cathartic” crime—especially Scottish crime—keeps trying to turn that into a product: bleak weather, sharp banter, a corpse to kick off the weekend. Malone’s work resists that consumption, even when the marketing doesn’t.
If you read Malone for the cozy shiver of darkness-at-a-distance, you’re the problem he’s writing around: a reader trained to treat other people’s ruin as ambience.
So no, I’m not interested in praising his “range” like it’s a LinkedIn skill. I’m interested in what his evolution exposes: how genre labels act as choke collars, how “tartan noir” can become a tourism brochure for misery, how readers keep asking to be cleansed by stories that should be leaving a taste of ash. If you want comfort, buy comfort. Don’t demand it from a writer whose work keeps insisting—correctly—that the damage doesn’t end when you close the book.
