Book Review: The Marksman

Book Review: 'The Marksman'
by Hugh Rae

2 / 5 Stars

Hugh Rae (1935 – 2014) was a Scottish author who, during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, published novels in a wide variety of genres, including crime, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy. Using the pseudonym ‘Jessica Stirling’, from 1974 to 2014 he published over 50 books, which were very popular, in the historical romance genre.  

The area did not have the air of a Glasgow suburb, but rather that of a small mining community. Damp November darkness swallowed the far horizons so that Weaver could easily sustain the illusion that nothing lay out there but fallow pastures and the ochre heaps of shale dumps. 

The men walked side by side along the pavement. It was cracked and pot-holed and mud-flecked like a newly excavated relic of the Roman period. The open acres adjacent to it were planted with surveyors’ stakes and construction dumps, tarns of mud and sour surface ash, foundation pits like mass graves and long bunkers of flung clay………

‘The Marksman’ first was published in 1971. This Sphere books paperback edition (269) is a 1987 printing. It is a tie-in to the BBC miniseries based on the novel, that aired the same year.

The novel is set in Glasgow in the early 1970s. Its protagonist, Donald Weaver, is a Glaswegian ‘hard man’ and felon, who has been living in comfort in Spain on the proceeds from a successful armed robbery. When Weaver gets a letter from the elderly Vincent Doyle, telling him that Weaver’s estranged son Gordon was brutally murdered in Glasgow almost a year ago, Weaver returns to his old haunts on a mission of vengeance.

Weaver has little love or sentimentality for his hometown, but doggedly makes the rounds of the neighborhoods in the early Winter darkness and drizzle. It's no easy task; the police closed the case after making a cursory effort to solve it, and the Glasgow demi-monde are less than helpful in responding to Weaver’s inquiries. 

To maintain his short-term stay in Glasgow Weaver is obliged to procure more money, and despite misgivings, teams up with a fellow thief for what seems to be a straightforward job. But a crooked cop is in on the take, and when alliances go bad, Weaver discovers that even as he pursues his son’s murderers, he himself is pursued by parties who prefer to dispense their justice in as unpleasant a manner as possible. For Donald Weaver, time is running out, and with each passing day, the operatives in the Glasgow underworld come closer to putting a bullet in his brain…….

‘The Marksman’ starts off well, benefitting from its setting in Glasgow and the author’s familiarity with that milieu. Weaver’s misadventures take place against a backdrop of gritty, threatening landscapes and supporting characters. 

Unfortunately, as the novel progresses, it becomes very slow going, heavily padded with lengthy philosophical and psychological expositions that indicate author Rae wanted 'The Marksman' to be a 'literary' work, one that transcended the crime genre. 

The final confrontation between Weaver and his adversaries relies on a series of improbable actions that, after dutifully plodding through 255 pages of plot set-up, I found deflatingly contrived.

'The Marksman' is a two-star Brit Crime novel. Recommended only for those with the patience for a dilatory narrative preoccupied with character development, mood, and atmosphere over plot.