Laidlaw

The seventies. The tough town. Laidlaw, Glasgow’s philosopher detective, is trying to find out who killed the lassie in the park. Arguably the template for Taggart, arguably the starting point for Tartan Noir.

I liked the way its bark was just as bad as its bite. It threatens to explode into violence all the way through, between most of its characters–then it does. Hard cases. And yet, at the very end, incredibly, compassion and sympathy.

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… show more.

I still have my treasured original copy of Laidlaw by Willie McIlvanney, and also the more recently published edition. Laidlaw, as Willie said, is first and foremost a man, who just happens to be a policeman. My father was a detective, working on the front line, and we often saw the effect that had on him. So Laidlaw rang true to me, in its questioning, Who is the true monster among us? In its voice and rhythm, which sounded undeniably Scottish, and most of all, in its humanity. 

Laidlaw inspired me to write my book. It also inspired me… show more.

If you were to read only one novel on my list, make it Laidlaw by William McIlvanney, the godfather of so-called Tartan Noir. When written, crime fiction was thought of as a lesser form of fiction, but McIlvanney’s lead, Jack Laidlaw, rises from the pages as a complex, very human character, to rival any writer’s protagonist, and is never a stereotype.

Re-reading the novel, at a time when I began writing my first book, it was the delivery of reality within fiction that informed me first, and then I realised that McIlvanney’s secondary characters were not hollow walk-on cast… show more.