The best books that show the diversity of Scottish crime writing

I’m not usually a fan of the police procedural type of crime novel, but I would always make an exception for this book. Arguably the book that kick-started the ‘Tartan Noir’ genre of modern Scottish crime fiction, this story follows the gritty, witty Chandler-esque detective, Laidlaw, as he tries to track down the murderer of a Glasgow teenager.

This sounds like the plot of so many crime novels, but what elevates this book for me is the wonderful prose that surrounds the hard Glasgow setting, along with Laidlaw’s sense of social injustice and inequality and his empathy with those very inhabitants of the criminal underworld he is forced to navigate.

I love books with unusual structures, and this one certainly fits the bill. The story concerns the violent murder of three crofters (farmers) in a remote Scottish Highland community in 1869.

When reading the book and the way it is presented, you are never sure if you are reading true witness testimonies, contemporaneous court reports and medical statements, or the confession of the actual murderer himself. Unreliable narrators can sometimes be frustrating, but in this case, how sure are we that any of what we are reading is actually true?

The book delivers a sort of courtroom drama in which the reader is left to piece together to draw their own conclusion.

Crime novels can often take themselves too seriously, but a fair proportion of Scottish crime writing tends to buck this trend.

Douglas Skelton has several novels that, while dealing with unsavory, violent characters and deadly situations, make us laugh with the sheer joy of witty dialogue and the blackest of black humor.

This book is one of these (even the title makes me smile!). The fast pace, quick-fire jokes, and knowing references to film noir of the 40s and 50s make this a compulsive, entertaining page-turner.

This book, by Louise Welsh, has an air of darkness and gloom that permeates the whole book from the very first page–something I find hugely compelling.

Although set in modern-day Glasgow, this story could be a gothic horror from the nineteenth century. Rilke, a thin, dark figure whose work as an auctioneer tasked with clearing the contents of the house of someone who has recently died, leads him to the discovery of a set of sadomasochistic torture photographs of a young woman that might, in fact, be actual snuff photos. His determination to discover what happened to the woman leads him into the city's dark, seedy underbelly that few of its inhabitants would be aware of.

I found this book to be incredibly unsettling, though the writing is beautifully constructed in a lyrical literary style, which drew me deeper and deeper into a world I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know.

I love seeing rich, powerful, and corrupt figures get their just desserts, and this book delivers this in spades–very inventive spades.

Here, a gonzo journalist finds that important people he has been writing about are turning up dead, murdered in fascinatingly brutal and clever ways. Murders that make us, the readers, just as complicit as the perpetrator since, while we may want to look away, the vicarious satisfaction we get from them surely condemns us as much as the killer.

I’m using the word ‘we’ here, but maybe I just mean myself–I doubt it! This makes this book sound like a grim read, but it isn’t–Banks was a superb, funny, socially aware writer who could deliver memorable, entertaining characters, some of whom you’d like to hang out with, others not so much…