The Golden Venus Affair
By Angus MacVicar
When Bruce McLintock is thrown out of a Glasgow nightclub called the Golden Venus, drunk and incapable, he has just lost his wife, his job on the Courier, his self-respect.
But he is taken in hand by Detective Chief Inspector Archie MacPherson and begins a new life as a freelance journalist and private investigator, with Mary Jo Milliken, capable, warm-hearted, the wife of a permanent invalid, as his secretary.
This is McLintock’s first important case, a drama involving blackmail, lust and greed played out against a background of crime and political unrest in Scotland and Northern Ireland. His unmasking of ‘the big boss’, who whistles Lord of the Dance, provides a sensational twist at the end.
Leavening the violent action is a tender-and unusual-love story.
Angus MacVicar, who is married with one son, was born in Argyll in 1908. He started to write on leaving Glasgow University in 1931, and apart from eighteen months as editor of The Campbeltown Courier and five years as a temporary soldier during the war-when as an officer in the Royal Scots Fusiliers he took part in the assault landings on Madagascar, Sicily and Italy and was mentioned in dispatches at Anzio-he has been a freelance ever since. His autobiography Salt in my Porridge, published in January 1971, is in its fourth impression.