A mystery, thriller and portrait of a vital city--Glasgow--The Bad Fire is Campbell Armstrong's finest novel since his unforgettable worldwide bestseller Jig.

 Eddie Mallon has grown away from his roots, and away from the city of Glasgow. Eddie was just a child when his family fractured down the middle. He went to America with his mother; his sister Joyce stayed in Glasgow with their father, the charming, violent, mercurial Jackie Mallon. 

Now Jackie has been murdered and the son he didn't know is coming home for the funeral. Try as he might, Eddie cannot resist pushing beyond the bland front presented by the local investigators. And when he does, he finds himself spiralling into the mysteries of the past as well as the present. 

The "bad fire" is the place where children are told they will go if they commit a sin. Eddie is about to discover that even after all these years, the fire never goes out. 

Lyrical, elegiac, full of suspense and thrilling, The Bad Fire is populated by a cast of superbly drawn individuals, with the city of Glasgow a brilliantly evoked character in its own right. 

"Armstrong is a wonderfully atmospheric writer who shines a light into the dark corners of the human heart"--Sunday Telegraph

 "Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers ... near to unputdownable"--GQ 

Synopsis 
Eddie has grown away from his roots, and away from the city of Glasgow. He went to America with his mother as a child, but his sister Joyce stayed with their father - the charming and violent Jackie Mallon. Now Jackie has been murdered and the son he didn't know is coming home for the funeral. 

The author, campbell armstrong armstron@iol.ie , 10 February, 2001 
The Bad Fire is the first novel I've written that's set entirely in my home town: Glasgow. Although it's a story of a crime, and the sometimes contorted relationships inside a broken family; although it's the story of a criminal investigation and family secrets and one man's memory of his absentee father - I've also tried to make the city a character in its own right. I've tried to evoke an atmosphere that emphasises Glasgow's changing moods and appearances, vibrant, dark, rough, sophisticated, beautiful, ugly, divided - a brilliant city, a great city, where the past and the present sometimes conjoin in an uneasy way. 

The publisher, HarperCollins , 26 March, 2001 
Eddie Mallon has grown away from his roots, and away from the city of Glasgow. Eddie was just a child when his family fractured down the middle. He went to America with his mother; his sister Joyce stayed in Glasgow with their father, the charming, violent, mercurial Jackie Mallon. 

Now Jackie has been murdered and the son he didn't know is coming home for the funeral. Try as he might, Eddie cannot resist pushing beyond the bland front presented by the local investigators. And when he does, he finds himself spiralling into the mysteries of the past as well as the present.

The Bad Fire is the place where children are told they will go if they commit a sin. Eddie is about to find out that even after all these years, the fire never goes out.

• Campbell Armstrong returns to his native Glasgow with a novel as full of human insight and relentless suspense as anything he has written in his remarkable career.

• Lyrical, elegiac, suspenseful and thrilling, THE BAD FIRE is populated by a cast of superbly drawn individuals, with the city of Glasgow a brilliantly evoked character in its own right.

'Armstrong is a wonderfully atmospheric writer who shines a light into the dark corners of the human heart' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

'Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers . . . near to unputdownable' GQ 

Burning questionsA telephone call from long ago echoes through The Bad Fire. A conversation between father and son, separated by circumstance and continents. In 1983 Campbell Armstrong spoke to his father Tom for what became the last time. Tom Black, a former shipyard worker with Harland & Wolf, had moved from his native Glasgow to Dundee to work at the Timex factory. His son had long since moved to America and the sizzling state of Arizona. When his parents visited, his father enjoyed playing Blackjack in the casinos of Las Vegas. "He liked the idea of the free drinks," Armstrong recalls. 

When Tom was diagnosed as suffering from lung cancer, Armstrong was stuck, trapped by an entrance visa long expired. To visit Scotland would leave him exiled from his new home, his wife and three children. 

A thriller writer with a growing reputation , he hatched a plan as inventive as any peeled from the page. He would travel to Scotland to see his father for one last time, then fly back into Canada, where friends would collect him and smuggle him over the border in the boot of a car. Like many dreams, however, it never slipped from fantasy into reality. 

In their final telephone conversation, Campbell, guilt-stricken and desperate, described his plan to a dad who was understanding and accepting in the ways only dads can be. It was all right, son. He understood. The conversation closed with father and son wishing the other a simple "Good night". A few days, later his dad was dead and the funeral passed without his son’s attendance. 

Over the next 18 years Armstrong would develop a formidable following as one of the world’s leading political thriller writers. He would trace desperate men through the streets of Los Angeles, the corridors of Washington and the open squares of Moscow. In best-selling novels such as Jig, Mambo and Heat government ministers were cremated in cars, terrorists were shot in the face and women had their throats neatly slit. Glasgow, his native city, would receive the occasional cameo appearance, a ghost fleeting in the background. 

In Agents of Darkness, for instance, a Washington conspiracy is uncovered by a drunken cop, Charlie Galloway, born on the Clyde but employed by the L A Police Department: "What Galloway longed for as he sat inside his Toyota in the frazzled parking lot of the Palms Hotel near Hollywood Boulevard was the kind of drab cloudy Glasgow day known as dreich, when the river emitted an ectoplasmic mist and gulls screeched unseen like phantom birds and dampness soaked through everything. How was it possible he could smell wet parkland even as he observed the shimmering entrance to a Californian hotel across a stretch of concrete where stationary vehicles reflected light with such hot intensity his eyeballs burned?" 

Now, after 12 novels, two novelisations, one memoir and 37 years in exile, Armstrong has come home. In The Bad Fire, his new novel and the first set in "the dear green place", Armstrong explores the changing face of a city he first left in 1964, a city of poverty, rubbish and thick black soot that is now dusted down, smartened up and where the only true constant is crime. In a bittersweet echo of his own life, the central character, Eddie Mallon, is an ex-pat, a New York cop drawn back to the city of his childhood after 30 years by the murder of his father, a rogue who has spent his life skipping along the thin line between the legal and illegal. 

The Bad Fire combines the format of the crime thriller with the meditations of a literate prodigal son. The reader follows Mallon as he attempts to reassemble his father’s fractured life while keeping an eye on a bent cop, and a gangster called Roddy Haggs whohas a passion for old pistols and violent action. There is also the added complication of a distant relationship with a younger sister raised by the father in Glasgow after their parents’ separation and their mother’s move to the States. 

The novel was one of the hardest books he has written, Armstrong says, as he attempted to balance a portrait of the city with the demands of the plot. "Glasgow never leaves you, no matter where you go to in the world. I have always known that in my soul I was a Glaswegian. In America people thought I sounded Glaswegian and in Glasgow people think I sound American. I always wanted to do a serious book about Glasgow and I had the idea of somebody coming back who had not been there for many, many years. 

"It was a blessed relief to come back to something that was so familiar, but on the other hand it was a great challenge to try and capture some of the city. I could have written something from memory about the city in the 1950s and 60s even though that city no longer exists, but to come back to a city that has completely reinvented itself is quite a shock. I really did try to make it a book about a family and seriously unresolved issues between father and son. 

"There are certain things I would not have minded sitting down and talking with my own father about and it’s all too late now, like it was too late for the character in the book to say anything to his father. That is kind of tragic - there are things you would love to say and they are no longer there to listen, so you stuff them away. Maybe the book was an attempt to work some of that stuff out." 

Today Armstrong lives in another dear green place, in a large, 18th-century country house in the rolling countryside of County Offaly, an hour’s drive from Dublin. Sitting in the expansive drawing room, beside the grand piano and the elegant furniture, Armstrong looks out on the show horses in the paddock outside the windows. The home is a testament to a career full of successful character assassinations, plus the benefits of the Irish government’s tax exemption to working authors. He moved to Ireland in 1991 with his second wife, Rebecca, and purchased the house after a single drunken viewing. He has been sober for six years now, but the house’s maintenance and restoration work is still enough to induce a hangover. After the furnace heat of Sedona in Arizona, Campbell is content. 

Armstrong was born and raised in Govan, Glasgow, before the family moved to Dennistoun in the east of the city. He walked out of school rather than accept a dose of corporal punishment and went to work in a record store where he fell in love with Eileen, the manageress, who was five years his senior. The couple moved to London and when his earlier novels, Midden Rakers and The Punctual Rape - which he now describes as "McKafka" - failed to take off he moved into publishing. In his years in London he found himself re-writing Papillon for author Henri Charrière - "He never would show me the butterfly that was tattooed on his chest," he says. A natural wanderer, Armstrong took his wife and three young children to America in pursuit of an academic career, but the students were as likely to find their lecturer propping up the nearest bar as correcting their compositions. The family moved from up-state New York to Arizona where Armstrong took a crack at thriller writing, so depressed was he by the literary standards of the competition. His first two novels, Asterisk and Brainfire attracted the attention of Hollywood and Armstrong was asked to write the novelisations of Dressed to Kill with Brian De Palma and then, a couple of years later, Raiders of the Lost Ark. The offer of $40,000 to write Raiders of the Lost Ark was made when he was semi-drunk in a bar. He had a month to write the book, but when he awoke from an alcohol and cocaine binge he had less than a week left to deadline. He wrote the book in just four days. 

His big break came when Jig, a thriller about an IRA assassin working in America, became an international best-seller and earned him a $1 million advance for his next three books. By this time his marriage had collapsed and he was living with his second wife, Rebecca. The twists and turns of his writing career became a strand of his most recent international best-seller, All That Really Matters, a memoir about the death of his first wife from cancer and the remarkable coincidences that occurred. As a 16-year-old, Eileen had become pregnant and was forced to give up the child for adoption. In 1998 when she was terminally ill, her daughter, Barbara, succeeded in tracking her down. She too was dying of cancer. 

What would have been dismissed as an unbelievable weepy by any publisher became a book that has since been serialised on Radio 4, narrated by Brian Cox, and continues to bring Armstrong appreciative letters and e-mails. It also served to nudge him from his comfort zone and prompt him to write his Glasgow novel. To research the novel Armstrong took a series of visits to the city where he would walk for hours through streets once familiar now rendered foreign. "I came over about four or five times and would just walk around. I also poured over the street maps and found Egypt, Glasgow, which I just loved - it’s a small area in the East End and I knew I wanted to have a Jewish cop come from Egypt. It’s these little quirks that keep me going. It was amazing how much the city had changed. I remembered it being so big and smelly." 

After so long writing in the jargon of the States, Armstrong contacted Strathclyde Police for some advice on Scottish policing. He met a couple of officers for coffee and although he insisted he was not writing a standard police procedural they were only too keen to help. "They were lovely guys and said it was time someone wrote a crime novel set in Glasgow that was not a strict procedural." 

Campbell doubts he will ever move back to Scotland, but feels revitalised by moving his fiction from over the Atlantic. In his sparse upstairs study another novel, this time following the career of Lou Perelman, the Jewish detective introduced in The Bad Fire, continues to take shape. "The Jewish cop interests me. He is part of the Jewish community, with a set of aunts trying to matchmake for him. So he moves away from the south side to the East End. At the moment I’m just enjoying myself, pushing these people around the screen." 

Armstrong may still feel personal issues remain unresolved but there is little doubt that if his dad had lived he would be proud. 

The Bad Fire is published next week by HarperCollins, priced £9.99. 

Stephen McGinty
Saturday, 12th May 2001
The Scotsman