Detective Chief Inspector Jack Buchanan, whose wife, Karen, calls him an anachronism in the 21st century, a comment he whole heartily endorses, is a 35-year veteran of policing in Glasgow, which some observers call "The Mean City". When he walked the beat in the Gorbals area of Glasgow as a young PC, his idea of street justice was to take the miscreant down a dark alley, thump seven bells of hell out of them and send them on their way with a warning never to do it again. Now 35 years later, and with the advent of PACE, he'd reluctantly had to modify his methods. He would have happily served out his time working in Glasgow. It was an unfortunate alterfication in Porters bar that had him seconded south to Sussex CID and Eastbourne in Sussex, a fish out of water .