Sunday 1 March 2020

Streets of Glasgow: "Laidlaw" by William McIlvanney


Laidlaw
by William McIlvanney
A review


In 1966, Scottish novelist, poet and essayist William McIlvanney (1936-2015) won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for his debut novel Remedy is None.  In 1975, he won the Whitbread Novel Award for Docherty, a gritty piece of historical fiction about a Scottish mining family in the early 20th Century.  Having thus been anointed as a “literary” writer, the publication of crime novel Laidlaw in 1977 came as a surprise, if not a shock. What was McIlvanney doing, putting his literary credentials at risk by writing a detective novel?  Laidlaw would be followed by two other instalments in a trilogy featuring the eponymous Glasgow detective, establishing his creator (with the benefit of hindsight) as the father of “tartan noir”, an ongoing inspiration for the likes of Ian Rankin and Val McDermid.   The reaction to the publication of the novel in the 1970s, however, shows that a certain suspicion towards “genre fiction” has long been an unsavoury aspect of the literary world.  Reading Laidlaw, on the other hand, proves that why this snobbery is completely off the mark.

At face value, the novel is a tribute to both the American “hardboiled” genre and to Continental fiction (a là Simenon), with which it shares several recognisable tropes.  A young woman is sexually assaulted and brutally murdered in Glasgow and D.I. Jack Laidlaw is assigned to the case. Laidlaw, who keeps “Kierkegaard, Camus and Unamuno” hidden in a drawer in his desk “like caches of alcohol”, is an eccentric figure with unusual investigative methods, “a potentially violent man who hates violence”.  When constable Harkness is asked by his superiors to partner up with Laidlaw, he is expected not just to help the older detective but also to report on him and keep his wilder behaviour in check.   The case leads the duo through the seedy underbelly of Glasgow, where Laidlaw enjoys the grudging respect of dubious figures.  But the “polis” are not the only once seeking the murderer.  The relatives of the victim are looking for him to avenge her death, whilst criminals associated with him want him out of the way because of the unwelcome attention the crime has brought to their activities.  The investigation turns into a race against time, with the murderer in danger of becoming the new victim.

Despite its nods to the genre, McIlvanney brings to this novel some idiosyncratic twists.  One of them is the setting – no longer an American metropolis, or London (another “capital” of crime fiction) but 1970s Glasgow with which Laidlaw (and possibly, his creator) seems to have a love-hate relationship.   The Glaswegian backdrop is evoked not only through the descriptions within the novel, but also through the judicious use of dialect.

Then there’s the plot.  Unlike your typical whodunnit, the murderer is revealed quite early on, as is his motive.  The reader’s pleasure does not derive from the unmasking of the perpetrator but, rather, from learning how Laidlaw will get to his man and from a curiosity as to whether others will get to the ‘prey’ before he does.  This is as much of a thriller as a “detective” novel.  

Laidlaw also gives McIlvanney the opportunity to explore the same socialist themes which underlie his other “non-crime” work.  The conversations between the inspector and an increasingly respectful Harkness give voice to pithy social commentary which lays bare the bigotry (whether fuelled by class, religion or other factors) within the world McIlvanney portrays.

What gives Laidlaw is peculiar style, however, is its use of language – the unlikely, yet arresting, images which pepper the text.  The victim’s father has a face which looks “like an argument you couldn’t win”.  The police mortuary is “the tradesmen’s entrance to the Court”, where “the raw materials of justice” are delivered, “corpses that are precipitates of strange experience, alloys of fear and hate and anger and love and viciousness and bewilderment, that the Court will take and refine into comprehension”.   Laidlaw is sickened when he realises that “the first law is real estate, and people are its property”.  This is crime fiction, but it is also poetry. 


304 pages
Expected publication: April 2nd 2020 by Canongate (first published 1977)

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