The division of Clifford Hanley's books into two categories--those written under his own name and those attributed to a pseudonym--immediately suggests his conformity with a major cliche of modern Scottish literary criticism: that Scottish writers are the victims of a series of particularly deep historical divisions in their society and its culture, and that this inheritance results in their reflection and embodiment, in literary terms, of the varieties of national schizophrenia. But the choice of "Henry Calvin" as that pseudonym, with its reference to the religious reformation, often held to be the origin and original of those many divisions, is so explicit as to constitute a joke against the critics; and the joke is heightened by the fact that the interesting division in Hanley's work is not between the novels and the thrillers--although they are published under different names--but between the fiction, which may use Scotland as a...