Laidlaw

By William McIlvanney

Book One in the Laidlaw Trilogy

“Laidlaw...‘is not just an inspector of crime; he’s an inspector of society.’”—Allan Massie, “The Father of ‘Tartan Noir’,” Wall Street Journal

Introducing Jack Laidlaw, the original damaged detective.

The Laidlaw novels, a groundbreaking trilogy that changed the face of Scottish fiction, are credited with being the founding books of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors like Val McDermid, Denise Mina, and Ian Rankin. Says McDermid of William McIlvanney: "Patricia Highsmith had taken us inside the head of killers; Ruth Rendell tentatively explored sexuality; with No Mean City, Alexander McArthur had exposed Glasgow to the world; Raymond Chandler had dressed the darkness in clever words. But nobody had ever smashed those elements together into so accomplished a synthesis."

In Laidlaw, the first book of the seies, readers meet Jack Laidlaw, a hard-drinking philosopher-detective whose tough exterior cloaks a rich humanity and keen intelligence. Laidlaw's investigation into the murder of a young woman brings him into conflict with Glasgow's hard men, its gangland villians, and the moneyed thugs who control the city. As the gangsters running Glasgow race Laidlaw for the discovery of the young woman's killer, a sense of dangerous betrayal infests the city that only Laidlaw can erase.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Release date: Jun 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781609452124

William McIlvanney

William McIlvanney is widely credited as the founder of the Tartan Noir movement that includes authors such as Denise Mina, Ian Banks, and Val McDermid, all of whom cite him as an influence and inspiration. McIlvanney’s Laidlaw trilogy “changed the face of Scottish fiction” (The Times of London), his Docherty won the Whitbread Award for Fiction, and his Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association. Strange Loyalties won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize. William passed away in December 2015.

Reviews for Laidlaw

[the7ken7petersen · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the first William McIlvanney book that I have read and, for the first fifty pages, I wondered why I was bothering. This was not due to any fault of the author, but to the fact that the book was so far from my preconceptions as to cause a rift. Once I accepted it for what it was, I thoroughly enjoyed it.On this evidence, McIlvanney is a sort of British Philip Marlow. Don't read too much into that, it is simply that he has a wonderful way of using language, "The bell had a sugary chime, a finger full of schmaltz". Tell me that you haven't had that response to ringing a doorbell...The book isn't really a thriller, or a crime story, it is more a slice of life in the mid nineteen-seventies. The characters are all larger than life but, somehow, under McIlvanney's pen, that makes the tale all the more real. It is brave, and tells something that definitely needed to be said then, and bears the reminder today. Reading it in the sexually more enlightened twenty-first century, one has to remember how daring this novel would have been to sympathise with a homosexual who killed a pretty young girl. Sadly, William McIlvenney passed away recently and so, there will be no addition to the small canon of Laidlaw books and I shall be reading the others soon.

[johnwbeha · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is fairly standard Glasgow crime fare and I was a bit surprised to see the award nominations. But i enjoyed it enough to buy book 2 in the series.

[jkdavies · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Stunning.
Stunningly written, with phrases that make a character come alive in the time it takes to slide your eyes along a sentence... The writing is so precise it's almost stark, and yet a whole life is contained therein. Did I mention stunning? William McIlvanney even tells us whodunit at the beginning, and still we want to read to find out more about the people and the things going on in the city...

On a pub atmosphere:
"The room was the resort of men who hadn't much beyond a sense of themselves and weren't inclined to have that sense diminished."

On a twenty year mis-marriage:
"In her eyes there was still a light he could neither feed nor douse."
"He sat behind his enormous mound of Dutch courage and wilted. He did it gracefully, he has been practising for years."

On Laidlaw himself, recovering after a personal admission:
"He had been watching Laidlaw draw protection from his clothes, socks, trouser, shirt and jacket, until the rawness of himself had grown a shell. Laidlaw shaped the big knot on his tie. He jutted his chin out and ran his hand along its edges, checking for bristles. He put his tongue across his teeth and showed them to himself in the mirror. He was no longer at home to visitors."

[johnjgaynard · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For years I heard that Laidlaw by McIlvanney was a classic and the father of all modern Scottish crime novels. Now that I have read it myself, I can say that I totally agree with this evaluation and I will read as soon as posible the two books McIlvanney wrote after Laidlaw. The dialect can be a little difficult to understand in the beginning, but it is well worth spending a couple of seconds on the first few phrases to get yourself equipped for reading the rest of the book and getting an education about the Glasgow hard man/soft man Laidlaw from a first rate writer.

[asxz-2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well that was the real deal. The original Tartan Noir and it shows up Rankin and Renus for the half-arsed dilettantes I have always considered them.

I had lined this up as my next read but two days before I got to it William McIlvanney died. So my reading became an ambiguous tribute - ambiguous because I didn't know whether I'd like it or not. I did like it. Very much. Laidlaw is an unloved detective. He uses empathy rather than interrogation, buses rather than squad cars. His Glasgow is every bit as squalid and alive as Rankin's Edinburgh, but his policing is real and his doubts are believable.

Also, the writing is glorious. Just a wee example is this description of the slow mannered drawl of a habitually drunk informant:

"His speech had come out like ink in the rain."

Tremendous.

[ffortsa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The original dark Scottish procedural, written by a poet, and it shows. The language is surprising, sometimes very funny, which is saying a lot considering how dark this book is. Set in 70s Glasgow, the story follows the detective Laidlaw as he searches in his less than conventional ways for the murderer of a young woman. Laidlaw is the model of the wounded detective, sustaining family troubles and doubts about his profession, society, and humanity at large. Speaking of professional athletes, he calls them the 'temple prostitutes of capitalism', and that sounds just right. It is an intensely visual book as well; so much of the time I could see the setting even when the parties spoke in the dialect of lower-class and underground criminal Glasgow (once in a while I had to look up a slang word, just to be sure.) All the people are real, often angry, sometimes desperate, weighed down by their particular loss. There are two more Laidlaw books written by McIlvaney, and I am told Ian Rankin has been tapped to continue the series. I'll read up and see how he does.

[diana.hauser · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

LAIDLAW. The Laidlaw Investigation Book 1 is written by William McIlvanney. The title is Book 1 of 3 of The Laidlaw Investigations.The Laidlaw Trilogy is a groundbreaking book; considered to be one of, if not THE founding book of the Tartan Noir movement.In Laidlaw, the first book of the trilogy, we meet Jack Laidlaw, a “hard-drinking philosopher-detective whose tough exterior cloaks a rich humanity and keen intelligence.”An excellent read. Gritty. Rough. Violent. Classic Noir. Classic Tartan Noir.****

[alanteder · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Tartan Noir circa 1977Review of the Canongate Books audiobook edition (2013) of the 1977 originalCanongate Books appear to be doing a 2020 revival of the Laidlaw crime series by Scottish writer William McIlvanney (1936-2015) with new covers such as the one for the April 2, 2020 re-issue in print which is also the current equivalent on Audible. This 2013 audiobook was recorded with the author's own narration. I was intrigued to hear the author's own reading as those are comparatively rare in the audiobook world. It may not be the best format though for your introduction to Laidlaw. It is definitely authentic to have the book read in a Glaswegian accent, but I found my mind wandering in the appreciation of the musicality of the speech and often realizing that I had not been following the plot. I'm going to need to revisit this in print.

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Several years ago I read The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler and became an ardent fan of his writing. Laidlaw by William McIlvanney was first published almost forty years ago, almost four decades after The Big Sleep. It deserves to be considered alongside Chandler's great work. McIlvanney did for Glasgow what Chandler had done for Los Angeles, giving the city a fictional identity. Hemingway used to say that all American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn; it is similarly thought by some that modern Scottish crime writing — ‘tartan noir’ — comes out of Laidlaw.In one sense Laidlaw is unconventional. There is a chase — the whole novel is a chase, or at least a search for an elusive, even in some sense a shadowy quarry — but there is no mystery. The theme of the chase is introduced in the prologue of the novel with these almost poetic words:"Running was a strange thing. The sound was your feet slapping the pavement. The lights of passing cars battered your eyeballs. Your arms came up unevenly in front of you, reaching from nowhere, separate from you and from each other. It was like the hands of a lot of people drowning. And it was useless to notice these things. It was as if a car had crashed, the driver was dead, and this was the radio still playing to him."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 romanticized figure, like most of the best fictional policemen. He appeals to those with a philosophic turn of mind, for he keeps ‘Kierkegaard, Camus and Unamuno’ in a locked drawer of his desk, ‘like caches of alcohol’, and he believes in doubt. A murder to his mind is often the consequence of a series of unrelated acts and the uncertainties and tensions they provoke. His habit is to immerse himself, not unlike Simenon's famous detective Maigret, in the atmosphere of a case. He becomes what he calls ‘a traveler in the city’, moving out of his family home and into a hotel that has seen better days for the duration of the case. He can play the hard man, and even meet criminal godfathers on equal terms, but he despises the macho attitudes and narrow sympathies of fellow policemen who are rivals as much as colleagues.The other main character in the novel is Glasgow itself. McIlvanney demonstrates his love for the city with passages like this: "Sunday in the park--it was a nice day. A Glasgow sun was out, dully luminous, an eye with a cataract." He describes it as a place that is always talking to itself, one where even the derelicts and social failures realize, and reveal themselves, in conversation that is often a monologue. There are also bit players, characters who may have only walk-on parts that have little or nothing to do with the plot, but whose appearance, movement and talk contribute to the vitality of the novel. One of the supporting characters who is developed in somewhat more depth is a young detective named Harkness who is assigned to assist Detective Inspector Laidlaw. He gradually becomes more comfortable with Laidlaw over the course of the investigation and the author uses him to give the reader a more complete picture of Laidlaw himself, as he does in the quotation above and elsewhere: "Harkness felt the evening go off again. Gratified at having brought in Alan MacInnes, he was dismayed at Laidlaw's aloofness about it. Looking after him, he reflected that he was the kind of policeman his father might like."The search is told in mosaic fashion with the pieces of the story and the characters involved slowly coming into better view as the pieces are laid. The emotions and motivations of characters are demonstrated through actions that build inexorably toward an inevitable denouement. In many ways it is a satisfying tale. Even though the novel was written almost four decades ago it retains the freshness of all good crime novels.

[daftboy1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I originally started reading this book over 25 years ago at school but I was too young for it. This is a story set in Glasgow 1977, Laidlaw is a Police Detective investigating a young womans death. There are lots of characters so called hard men along the way that Laidlaw along with his assistant Harkness come across. OK twist at the end I was a bit disappointed though as I really wanted to enjoy this book more. I might still read the other 2 in the series. Still glad I read it though.

[5eva5 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A young woman is found murdered and DI Laidlaw has to navigate office and street politics in order not only to find the murderer, but indeed to keep him alive. Laidlaw is not your regular hard man noir detective, but rather a fairly sensitive man who fights hard to make others in the police force see the perpetrators as people rather than just simple criminals: "What we shouldn't do is compound the felony in our reaction to it. And that's what people keep doing. Faced with the enormity, they lose their nerve, and where they should see a man, they make a monster." The emphasis is on the psychological aspect of the crime and the criminal rather than the police procedure, so if you're looking for a whodunit, look elsewhere.In addition to the benefit of having a main character who takes everyone seriously, there's also McIlvanney's wonderful language, like describing the victim's father having a face "like an argument you couldn't win," or the people of Glasgow as devotees to the "Method School of Weather - a lot of people trying to achieve a subjective belief in the heat in the hope of convincing one another" (being from Sweden I can very much sympathize with that!). Seriously, though, the fact that McIlvanney is commonly referred to as "the father of Tartan Noir" is not surprising - his characters are hard men, but they're not purely Mr. Hyde, there's quite a lot of Dr. Jekyll's sense of fairness and strong conscience inherent in their personalities as well. This duality is obviously why Tartan Noir is interesting in the first place, and Laidlaw decidedly deserves the accolades it's received as the first in the genre.

[melanielgarrett · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I remember being blown away by this book when I read it the first time. But since my head is a gaping oubliette, I've recently dug out my old copy and am looking forward to reading it again.

[jtck121166 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Laidlaw is the original and to my mind the best of the damaged depressed and decent detectives in the morally grey world of cops 'n' robbers.Laid low by his wearying yet tireless analysis of (at least his own) human condition, Laidlaw is forensic in his use of colourful simile and metaphor, making the text literate almost to the point of literary, but the plot rattles along nicely enough for this to be a pleasure, not a pain.With a humour that is drier than MacBride's, and an angst that is blacker than Mankell's, this is one to savour.

[atticusfinch1048 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An Oldie but definitely a GoodieThis rerelease by Canongate Books of William McIlvanney’s defunctive detective is a brilliant reminder as to why he is considered one of Scotland’s best crime writers. For people my age, mid – 40s it makes the original Taggert look like a southern softie. This book was originally published back in 1977, and was the first in the Laidlaw trilogy. The novel is set in the 70s with all the fashions and griminess I remember as a kid, what would now be called post-industrial Glasgow, pre-Thatcher.Glasgow has always had the reputation of being a hard man’s city, where if you say the wrong thing you could end up with a Glasgow kiss. In the mid-1970s Glasgow was in decline, the tenement slums were at their worst, the shipyards were closing the pubs were rough and the hard men were simply nuts.We are introduced to Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw as he investigates the sexual murder of Jennifer Lawson, who’s father he had met in the early hours of a Sunday when he reported her missing. His daughter was found hidden on Glasgow Green on a Sunday morning minus her panties and completely defiled. It shows how desperate and disgusting the world can be. To assist him in the search he has been given a DC who has transferred into the Crime Squad, and Harkness has been warned that Laidlaw is different and he is to report back to the main inquiry.It is through this background of moral concerns of mid 70s Glasgow and all the social issues that go hand in hand with it. As Laidlaw tip toes his way through the moral decline of the City he used gangland villains such as John Rhodes to act as his ears on the street, if it works is a different matter. We are introduced to some of the gangland villains of Glasgow, and the self made men who could do without the police looking too closely at their affairs.This wonderful crime novel shows the City’s dark shadows and how sometimes you need to operate in them to achieve real success. This is a wonderful book with an original defective detective who solves the crime his way which is certainly not how the rest of the Police Force would do it, but he does succeed. Harkness is a willing voyeur on this journey through the harsh Glasgow criminal world on a learning curve and finally respecting Laidlaw.This is a wonderful trip back into the 1970s and the language that McIlvanney used then brings back the image of a decaying Glasgow and the harsh cruel world that operated around the city of the day. With people today walking around with mobile phones this brings memories back when not everyone has a phone at all and the old red phone boxes with your change waiting for the pips. This is a timeless classis well worth reading today.