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.
In one sense Laidlaw is unconventional. There is a chase — the whole novel is a chase, with a variety of people in search of their quarry — but there is no mystery. We know who the killer is from the first chapter in which a frightened bloodstained boy is running in terror and guilt from his own act. He is a boy of uncertain sexuality, shattered by what he has done. The questions are: who can identify him, and will the police reach him before other vengeful pursuers?
Jack Laidlaw himself is a romanticised figure, like most of the best fictional policemen. Of a philosophic turn of mind — he keeps ‘Kierkegaard, Camus and Unamuno’ in a locked drawer of his desk, ‘like caches of alcohol’ — he believes in doubt.
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