BookBrowse Reviews A Bad, Bad Place by Frances Crawford

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A girl from a working-class community in Glasgow makes a grisly discovery in this accomplished debut.

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In the British popular imagination, few periods are bleaker than the late 1970s. If the UK had shrugged off postwar austerity to enter the wild days of the Swinging Sixties, then what followed was the long hangover: energy crises that led to rolling blackouts, inflation at 20 percent, and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland spilling out onto the British mainland. The decade drew to a close with what Brits still refer to as the "Winter of Discontent"—a period of harsh snowstorms that coincided with large-scale strike action by (among others) waste collectors and gravediggers. As the country entered the 1980s, images of garbage piled up in the streets and unburied bodies piled up in the morgues were still fresh in the collective memory. Little wonder, then, that few look back fondly.

A Bad, Bad Place, the brilliant debut from Frances Crawford, takes readers to the very heart of this bleak time. The novel opens in Glasgow, Scotland's biggest city, as the Winter of Discontent is giving way to the spring of 1979. But things are only to get darker for Janey, a 12-year-old lover of punk rock from Possilpark, one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. While out walking Sid Vicious, her dog, she stumbles across the body of a young woman: murdered, lying in "black puddles of blood." It's a grisly discovery that not only traumatizes Janey but also sets off a chain of events no one could predict. The murdered woman turns out to have been the daughter of a gang boss bogged down in a turf war—and he's not one to leave the investigating to the police. As Janey gets sucked into his orbit, she's faced with a side of her city she could never have prepared for.

By her side is Maggie, her grandmother, who's raised Janey since her parents and sister died in a tenement gas explosion. As situations go, theirs is almost unremittingly grim—which is why it comes as such a pleasant surprise just how laugh-out-loud funny A Bad, Bad Place can be. The two characters share narration duties, and each faces down the direst of situations with razor-sharp wit and an empathetic eye. Although they're something of an odd couple (Maggie's more into the Psalms than the Sex Pistols), their relationship is founded on a mutual dependency that feels entirely true to life. Crucial to this is the fact they tell their own story in their own language: an easy-going, profanity-ridden Glaswegian dialect. While non-British readers may take time to hook into its rhythm and phrasing, that should be no barrier to entry. Indeed, the authenticity of Janey and Maggie's voices is what lends this wonderful novel so much of its power, heart, and humor.

Humor in particular is a life-saver in a city like Glasgow. As one of the poorest and most violent towns in the UK, it has for decades been defined in Scottish literature as the "bad, bad place" of the novel's title. But Crawford—who's publishing her debut at the age of 65 after recently graduating with an MLitt in Creative Writing—is wise enough to avoid the clichés. Her inspiration comes from her own youth in Possilpark in the 1970s, an upbringing which she's mined to offer us a narrative so rich in detail you can almost smell the dank rising from the beer-soaked pub carpets. The poverty and the casual violence are unavoidable, but Crawford doesn't fetishize them or exploit them to add grit to her tale. In her hands, they're never any more or any less than what they are: the lived experience of a tight-knit community getting by the best it can.

That word—community—runs through the book like a central artery. Yes, A Bad, Bad Place is an excellent whodunnit, but at its core it's a bittersweet love letter to the characters that (for good or for ill) made up this marginalized and underserved slice of society. What Crawford has achieved is no mean feat: a story that grips and characters that stroll fully formed off the page and into your consciousness, where they're bound to linger long after the final page. As the city's official motto goes, "People Make Glasgow"—and A Bad, Bad Place has some of the best and worst you could ever hope to meet.

This review first ran in the March 25, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.