Laidlaw by William McIlvanney - review

Laidlaw was first published in 1977, 36 years back from now, 38 on from The Big Sleep. Like Chandler’s classic it has survived the passage of time. William McIlvanney did for Glasgow what Chandler had done for Los Angeles, giving the city its fictional identity. Hemingway used to say that all American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn; all Scottish crime writing — ‘tartan noir’ — comes out of Laidlaw.

Two years before Laidlaw McIlvanney had won the Whitbread Prize for fiction with Docherty, a novel set in a mining community. This established him as the best Scottish novelist of his generation, and some of his admirers were dismayed when he followed it with a crime novel. Their response was understandable, for crime fiction was widely regarded at the time as mere entertainment, but it was also foolish. The crime novel deals with the darkest sides of human nature; it deals in sudden, unexplained and sometimes inexplicable violence, and its atmosphere is foul with the stench of fear.