ABSTRACT
As Chapter 1 highlights, the city has become something of a geographical cliché in narratives of crime and disorder in Scotland. Books, articles, films, TV documentaries, dramas, soap operas (together with a vast array of websites), present urban life as the staple location for tales of criminality, disorder and danger, even if these are sometimes too long-standing a staple source for many a comic. Typically these are the streets, pubs and public spaces – the ‘problem places’ – of urban Scotland. Here gangs, violence and disorderly behaviour lie in wait round every corner. This is the familiar fare from Rankin or Welsh’s Edinburgh, MacBride’s Aberdeen, Denise Mina or Taggart’s Glasgow, to Chris Longmuir’s debut crime novel Dead Wood set against ‘grim Dundee’, as well as the ‘true crime’ genre, insider accounts of street gangs and football hooligans, and biographies of police officers or urban Scotland’s most notorious criminals. Dangerous neighbourhoods are also prominently represented by a burgeoning website culture dedicated to condemning or celebrating certain neighbourhoods as pathologically gang-ridden and disorderly. While some non- or semi-urban areas feature, ‘problem places’ are overwhelmingly pictured as distinctively urban, typically council or social housing estates, and inner urban areas, such as the East End of Glasgow.
