In the late seventies the legendary French film director, Bernard Tavernier, made a science fiction movie set in the near future, titled ‘Death Watch’. In this future, people aren’t dressed in silver jump-suits and wearing jet-packs. Instead, Tavernier had a vision of a disturbing place, where the new had smashed like a brutalist asteroid through the decaying grandeur of the old, leaving the survivors clinging to the wreckage. He decided to set the film in Glasgow, and he didn’t need to use any special effects…Harvey Keitel and Harry Dean Stanton were probably not aware that while they were acting in the city, I was making a daily bus journey from school to home which took me through some of the bleaker areas of Glasgow’s East End. An asteroid had crashed through my own community, in the shape of the M8, taking with it streets, people, history and that irreplaceable human patina which only generations living in localities can create. We were decanted to a council estate on the outskirts of the city, but I remained in my local secondary school, where I was starting to show flickering signs of making something of myself. The grimmest part of my journey was the route down Abercromby Street in Calton. On one side lay the 18th century Calton Burial Ground: a sad, neglected and foreboding place, where hard lives and faint hopes were long buried and forgotten. Opposite lay a looming, soot-blackened, mock-Jacobean building which looked like a prison: The Abercromby Street Home For Males. This was what was known as a Model Lodging House in Glasgow: originally accommodation for single casual labourers, but by my time a place where old guys displaced by slum clearances hung out, drinking fortified wine – the Modellers – down on their luck and with no end-game that wasn’t tragic. One dark, rain-sodden November night, I was reading my evening paper as we sat in traffic opposite the Lodging House. I had finished with the football news and my eye caught a feature I hadn’t seen before: a list of unclaimed estates and an appeal to anyone who might have a relationship to the bereaved to get in touch. None of the estates were substantial – some were middling, most were small – but one was pathetic. Joseph Dunn had died aged 61 and had left £48. And there was no-one to claim it. As a teenage boy, it didn’t take long for a melancholy mood to overtake me, and Joseph Dunn’s bleak coda stirred my darkness. Then I noticed his last address: The Abercromby Street Home For Males…The shock that I had driven past him for a year or so, and had probably even seen him, never really left me, and it sowed a seed which would one day grow into a novel: ‘The Dead Collector’. For this to happen I had to realise that I was never going to make it as a poet and then further make the discovery that there were firms in the modern era which made a living out of tracking-down the heirs to unclaimed estates. I also needed to meet a central character whose experience mirrored that of the city: a man who felt evicted from the past and rejected by the future…someone haunted by loss and wary of attachment as a consequence. And so Andy Inkster was born – the eponymous Dead Collector – a man who made his living from picking the pockets of the dead, but took his real satisfaction from re-connecting them to those who they had become detached from in life.
‘And the dead call the dying, and finger at the doors…’ and in Inkster’s case, sometimes they didn’t come alone…