Craig Russell - The Long Glasgow Kiss

I went up to my rooms and listened to the Overseas Service for a while before tuning into the Home Service. There was an item on the news about the forthcoming fight between Bobby Kirkcaldy and Jan Schmidtke. It was one of the most anticipated fights in the city’s boxing history, despite the fact that the result was a foregone conclusion: the German slugger Schmidtke was universally considered to be outclassed and outgunned by the stylist Kirkcaldy.

I grinned smugly at the thought that I’d managed to spring a ticket for the fight, after all. The grin faded though, when I thought about how big-league Willie Sneddon’s and Jonny Cohen’s ambitions were becoming. Taking a slice of Bobby Kirkcaldy was stretching them beyond Glasgow. I started to feel uneasy about getting mixed up in whatever dodgy dealings were going on behind a sporting event of national significance.

But, there again, that was the business I was in. Dodgy dealings.

That summer, and for about a year leading up to it, ever since I’d gotten involved in all kinds of shenanigans down at the docks and ended up with holes in me where there shouldn’t be any, I had been trying to get myself straightened out. It was difficult to frame a description of my life without resorting to profanity and it was true to say that my life was truly fucked up. I guessed that was what people said about me: ‘Oh, there goes Lennox. Okay guy. Fucked up though.’ I had made a great effort over the last twelve months to diminish the fucked-upness of my life. I had one over-arching ambition: that one morning while shaving, I could look in the mirror without disliking the person who looked back at me.

The truth was I had been a straightforward, bright and as enthusiastic-as-all-hell, all-Canadian kid growing up on the shores of the Kennebecasis, with rich parents and an education at the upper-crusty Rothesay Collegiate College. Nothing fucked-up there. But then a little Austrian corporal decided to fuck up more than my world and I found myself an officer in the First Canadian Army and four thousand miles from home and up to my knees in mud and blood. The First Canadian, or at least those who led the First Canadian, had an enthusiasm for throwing my countrymen into the mincer. Normandy, Dieppe, Sicily. Wherever there was a serious-ordnance-ripping-through-human-flesh party, we tended to get the first invite. My excursion started in Sicily and lasted all the way through Italy, Holland and Germany. It was somewhere along the way during my Grand European Tour that the Kennebecasis Kid became yet another casualty of war. Whoever it was I became during the war, he fitted right in, right here in Glasgow.

And it had been while I stood in Glasgow, wearing a demob suit that I otherwise wouldn’t have been seen dead in and holding a ship ticket to Halifax, Nova Scotia, that I had first encountered the Three Kings.

There’s this misconception that all gangsters are the same. That all coppers are the same. Some people even believe, sometimes with a fair amount of justification, that all gangsters and all coppers are the same. The truth is that the underworld is a community like any other, with the same range and variety of personality, physical type and character that you find in any walk of life. You can’t even say that they are united in dishonesty or immorality. Some villains have a very strict moral code. Some don’t.

The Three Kings were a good example. What Willie Sneddon, Jonny Cohen and Hammer Murphy didn’t run in Glasgow wasn’t worth running. In 1948, Glasgow’s three leading crime lords had sat down over lunch in a civilized manner in the elegant surroundings of the Regency Oyster Bar and discussed the future. The upshot was that, while they sat and divided the lunch bill equally between them, they had done pretty much the same to Glasgow.

There had been nothing elegant or civilized about what had preceded their lunch. A vicious gang war, Sneddon and Cohen on one side, Murphy on the other, had threatened to wipe them all out. Added to which, the first casualty of war was profit. By the time Sneddon, Cohen and Murphy emerged from the Regency, a coronation had taken place: the three crime lords had become the three crime kings.

But, like I said, no one is the same, and the Three Kings were very different people. Willie Sneddon was a truly nasty piece of work. Devious and malignant. Sneddon, the Gorbals hard man, had robbed, murdered and tortured his way to the top. But he was smart. Even subtle.

Subtlety was not something you associated with Hammer Murphy, in much the same way you wouldn’t associate camels with the Antarctic. Michael Murphy had gained the epithet ‘Hammer’ after pulping the skull of rival gang boss Paul Cochrane with a lead barrel-headed builder’s mallet, in front of the assembled members of both gangs. Murphy was a man of limited intellect but possessed a viciousness as truly, awesomely monumental as the chip on his shoulder. He had embraced his new nickname with enthusiasm and was known to wield a hammer against knees, elbows and skulls whenever a suitable opportunity arose. It was, he had once confided in me, good to have a trademark.

Jonny Cohen, the third king, was a perfect illustration of the variety of personality and type within the criminal fraternity. Known as Handsome Jonny because of his film-star looks, Cohen was a decent kind of guy and a devoted husband and father who lived a quiet life in Newton Mearns — Tel-Aviv on the Clyde, as it was known in Glasgow. Or at least he was a decent, quiet-living kind of guy when he wasn’t holding up banks, organizing jewel robberies, running illegal bookies, that kind of thing. It was also true to say that Jonny had moved a few souls closer to the Lord in his time, but they had all been competitors or active playmates in the big Glasgow game. No civilians. I liked Jonny. I had good reason to: he had saved my neck. And when I first arrived in Glasgow, it had been Jonny who first suggested he and his colleagues could perhaps make use of my skills.

Don’t get me wrong. I had known exactly the kind of people I was getting involved with. And I had known that some of the enquiries I carried out for them took me very close to, and often over, a very fudged border between the legal and illegal. I’d gotten involved in some seedy and unpleasant shenanigans and, as time had gone on, I had felt like I was sinking deeper and deeper into a personality that I really didn’t care for. That’s why, over the last twelve or thirteen months, I’d been making a real effort to straighten myself out; and that meant having less to do with the Three Kings. Instead, I had been doing fine upstanding work for the community, mainly staging infidelities in seedy hotels for divorce cases. But the two cases I was now working on threatened to drag me back into the cosy embrace of Glasgow’s most dangerous men.

One thing that unites the criminal fraternity is that they don’t tend to keep banker’s hours. Extortion with menaces, vice, armed robbery and running brothels takes it out of you, and your average gangster tends not to be a morning person. So I decided to wait until the following afternoon before paying Jonny Cohen a house call, even though I knew that he, of all the Kings, had the closest to a normal daily schedule. I gave him a ring after lunch and we arranged to meet, conveniently, at the Pacific Club that evening about five.

I stood before the Pacific Club and contemplated glamour. It’s a funny thing, glamour. The word itself was as Scottish as they come, meaning a spell or an enchantment cast over someone to enrapture them. It was odd that, having invented the word, the Scots were totally at sea with the concept. Whenever they strived to achieve it, it just came out all wrong. No, that wasn’t entirely true. There were exceptions: Sheila Gainsborough had glamour in spades. Naturally and effortlessly. A rare achievement, given the lack of it in her origins.