The Bobby Muldoon Trilogy is the story of young Bobby 'Chicken Legs' Muldoon. Set in The Gorbals, Glasgow in the late sixties it follows Bobby as he meets one life crisis after another. However, Bobby is a Gorbals boy through and through and, despite his lack of confidence, he overcomes every obstacle in his path with determination and a sharp, witty sense of humour. The trilogy has been described as a heartwarming and hysterical journey for the reader.Kate Donne lives in Dollar, Clackmannanshire with her Welsh husband, Steve. She graduated from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland with a BA Degree in Dramatic Studies and has spent many years working in the arts. She now runs her own personal development consultancy.

Colin MacFarlane was born in the Gorbals in the 1950s, 20 years after the publication of No Mean City, the classic novel about pre-war life in what was once Glasgow's most deprived district. He lived in the same street as its fictional 'razor king', Johnnie Stark, and subsequently realised that a lot of the old characters represented in the book were still around as late as the 1960s. Men still wore bunnets and played pitch and toss; women still treated the steamie as their social club. The razor gangs were running amok once again, and filth, violence, crime, rats, poverty and drunkenness abounded, just like they did in No Mean City. MacFarlane witnessed the last days of the old Gorbals as a major regeneration programme, begun in 1961, was implemented, and, as a street boy, he had a unique insight into a once great community in rapid decline. In this engrossing book, MacFarlane reveals what it was really like to live in the old Gorbals.

Walter Norval was a man marked by destiny to be a career criminal in one of Britain's hardest cities. As a boy he grew up in a world of illegal betting, violent canal bank pitch-and-toss schools, sleazy dance halls, brothels and bars where the denizens of the slums in the north side of Glasgow slaked gargantuan thirsts and plotted murder and mayhem. Before he had reached his teens, close relatives had died as blood was spilled in the streets. As a youngster he ran 'messages' for the toughest gangsters in the city and stood guard over the pots of cash in illegal gambling schools. It was a remarkable apprenticeship, dangerous and sometimes deadly. It honed a latent toughness and a talent for lawbreaking that saw him emerge in the Seventies as the first of a succession of Glasgow godfathers. Dressed in pinstriped style, he controlled his foot soldiers with fearsome fists and planned robberies with the attention to detail of a military general. He organised various Glasgow fighting factions into a single gang, which pulled off a spectacular series of robberies. But, unlike his successors, he abhorred drugs and drug-dealing.And, in a remarkable twist, he joined the anti-drugs war in later life. His story - told by the best-selling crime historian Robert Jeffrey - provides a fascinating insight into the making of a criminal mastermind, from boy to man.

Over the twentieth century Scots' lives changed infast, dramatic and culturally significant ways. By examining their bodies,homes, working lives, rituals, beliefs and consumption, this volume exposeshow the very substance of everyday life was composed, tracing both theintimate and the mass changes that the people endured. Using novelperspectives and methods, chapters range across the experiences of work, artand death, the way Scots conceived of themselves and their homes, and theway the 'old Scotland' of oppressive community rules broke down frommid-century as the country reinvented its everyday life and culture. Thisvolume brings together leading cultural historians of twentieth-centuryScotland to study the apparently mundane activities of people's lives,traversing the key spaces where daily experience is composed to expose thecontroversial personal and national politics that ritual and practice cangenerate. Key features: *Contains an overview of the material changesexperienced by Scots in their everyday lives during the course of thecentury*Focuses on some of the key areas of change in everyday experience,from the way Scots spent their Sundays to the homes in which they lived,from the work they undertook to the culture they consumed and eventually theway they died. *Pays particular attention to identity as well asexperience