This second book in Mackay’s Glasgow Trilogy is mainly about 62 year old Frank MacLeod, a killer for a local drug gang.  Getting older and more fallible, he is at the end of his career of murder, and he is trying to work out what is next, or whether he might be able to somehow get back into the job. He has had a hip operation and it is slowing him down.  Despite his wish to perform at his old level, he just isn’t up to it.  The novel tells how he comes to terms with this, and what future there is for an ex-gunman. It sets the stage for the third novel in the series, providing the motivation for Frank’s successor Calum MacLean to get out from the job.

Mackay uses his characteristic approach, telling the story from the perspectives of the different main characters, one at a time, returning to them periodically, so we see the mistakes in thinking of each of the characters. So although Mackay does not give sophisticated psychological descriptions of his characters, he gives enough information for the reader to work out a lot about their psychology. So it is a complex way of telling the story.  The pragmatics of killing play a big role in the psychology: how to prepare, how to get it done, how dispose of the bodies, how to live with having done it, and keeping people’s trust once you have knowledge that could put them in prison. The life of a killer is solitary and often unhappy, so it takes an unusual person to be good at it. Through seeing Frank and Callum make their different decisions, we get a sense of what that kind of life would be like, and that makes this an unusual work.

How a Gunman Say Goodbye is more interesting than its successor, and the two are closely intertwined.  The performance of the unabridged audiobook by Angus King is solid.  Sometimes without the help of the printed format it is difficult to tell which perspective is being narrated, but that seems partly intentional on the part of the author, keeping the reader working out what is going on.

© 2015 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York