I'm reading a book at the moment, written by Tony Black. I've read one or two of his before and enjoyed them. They're pretty standard detective stories, set in Edinburgh so I assumed he was Scottish. However, it turns out that he is, in fact, Australian who spent much of his life in Scotland and Ireland. Moving from Australia to Scotland? It's usually the other way around.
This novel is called Paying For It and it's not like the others I've read. It's almost like an American hard-boiled detective novel, with that glib, tough-guy speech which doesn't ring true and I can't imagine it going down well on the streets of Edinburgh. In this novel, the author even slipped into an American usage which drives me mad. Talking about a character who had fallen on hard times, the detective, Gus Dury, says, 'I could care less!'
It's "I couldn't care less!", you cretin. 'I could care less' doesn't make sense in the context in which it was used. If you wanted to show that you had no sympathy for the character's difficulty and that she deserved all she gets, you would want to say that you don't care at all: that 'you could not care less.'
I wondered whether this was a novel aimed at the US market and written accordingly but I note that it was his first published work. I suspect if I had come across this novel first, I wouldn't have bothered with any of the others.
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