Scottish novelist and poet whose stories of the philosophical Glasgow police detective Jack Laidlaw made him ‘the godfather of tartan noir’
William McIlvanney, who has died aged 79, grew into the title “the godfather of tartan noir” – the term for Scottish crime fiction – though it was not one he fully welcomed. His grander ambitions are represented by the autobiographical novel Docherty (1975), a kind of Sons and Lovers of the industrial west of Scotland, for which McIlvanney was awarded the Whitbread prize. It was, however, the Glasgow-based crime novel Laidlaw, published two years later, which caught the fancy of the broader reading public.
Detectives with existential anxieties, marriage problems and a deep literary hinterland are not uncommon now, but Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw was a bright arrival on a dull Scottish literary scene in 1977. In policing the rougher territories of Glasgow and environs, Laidlaw found many things stacked against him; what he had going for him were a realistic outlook on life, abundantly laced with wit and philosophical reflection – a voice he inherited from his highly articulate creator.
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