Alan Parks Books in Order

If you want the full Harry McCoy story from the beginning: Bloody January → February's Son → Bobby March Will Live Forever
If you want an award-winning entry point: Bobby March Will Live Forever → The April Dead → May God Forgive
If you want McCoy at his darkest and most tangled: The April Dead → May God Forgive → To Die In June
If you want wartime espionage instead of 1970s police noir: Gunner

Alan Parks was born in Johnstone in 1963 and grew up nearby in Paisley, with Glasgow close at hand and always pulling focus. He later studied moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, but the city itself may have been the longer education. Its pubs, churches, football grounds, side streets, and sharp class divides would become the raw material for much of his fiction.

Writing was not his first life.

For more than twenty years he worked in the music business, first in management and then at London Records and Warner. He commissioned videos, artwork, and photography, and worked with artists including New Order, The Streets, All Saints, and Enya. That background helps explain why music in his novels never feels dropped in for effect. It feels like part of the air people breathe.

He came to fiction late. After returning to Glasgow in his fifties, he started writing what was supposed to be a book about social housing in postwar Glasgow. Somewhere along the way it turned into a crime novel set in 1973. That book became Bloody January. Parks has said a friend, novelist John Niven, helped pass the manuscript along, and that late turn gave him a full second career.

It worked out.

Most readers first meet him through Harry McCoy, the damaged detective at the center of Bloody January, February's Son, Bobby March Will Live Forever, The April Dead, May God Forgive, and To Die In June. These books are police procedurals, but they are also street-level social novels. McCoy moves through every layer of 1970s Glasgow, from hotel bars and police offices to brothels, hostels, and back courts, and Parks uses the cases to show how money, power, drugs, and violence connect people who would rather never meet.

What readers tend to like is not just the plotting, though the books move fast. It is the mix of toughness and feeling. McCoy is compromised, loyal to the wrong people, hard on himself, and rarely far from trouble, but he still pays attention to the people everyone else overlooks. The novels keep returning to damaged friendships, class pressure, addiction, corruption, and the way a city can shape the people trying to survive it.

Parks has also opened a second lane with Gunner, a wartime thriller set in 1941 Glasgow. Its lead, Joseph Gunner, is a wounded former detective pulled into murder and espionage during the Blitz. The setting changes, but some of Parks's strengths stay the same: strong local detail, moral mess, and characters who keep moving even when the right choice is hard to find. His books have picked up major awards too, including an Edgar for Bobby March Will Live Forever and the McIlvanney Prize for May God Forgive.

He still lives and works in Glasgow, and he has said that Harry McCoy's world is close to the map of his own childhood memories. That helps explain why even the darkest corners of these novels feel specific and lived in. By his own account, he now spends a lot of time walking and thinking up terrible things to do to people in the early 1970s. It sounds like a grim job. On the page, though, it suits him.