But I would live with it on my own terms. Dave Lyons wouldn’t win. That must not be. There are other things we can do with our capacity to betray one another besides condone it. We can quarrel with it till we die, as Scott had done in his way.
I thought of Scott now, trying to see him whole. I knew that there was in me a recurrent tendency to think back to the excitement of new beginnings and regret the ends they’ve come to. The bitterness that can give rise to is bearing false witness to life. I thought that the essence of life lies not in the defeat of our expectations but in the joy that they were ever there at all. Life’s a spendthrift mother. Once she has given what she has, it’s ungrateful to complain that she didn’t have the foresight to take out an insurance policy on your behalf. You just say thanks.
I did. He was my brother and that made for pride in me. I loved him in his anger and his weakness and the folly of his dying as much as ever I loved him in his strength and in his kindness. I found no part of him deniable.
And his last gift to me from the grave had perhaps been a more intense vision of the blackness in myself. It gave me a proper fear of who I was. In trying to penetrate the shadows in his life I had experienced more deeply the shadows in my own. I was his brother, all right. The beast he had fought, that ravens upon others, slept underneath my chair. I would have to try and learn to live with it as justly as I could. Beware thyself.
I had finished my whisky. I rose and filled out the last of the Antiquary. I put the empty bottle in the cupboard in the living-room. It’s where I keep some objects that matter to me as memory-hinges. They are all quite worthless, to be thrown out with my body. But they serve to remind me of some of the things I believe are important.
I watered my drink in the kitchen and came back through. I remembered the card Scott had written to Michael Preston. I took it out of my pocket and stuck it in the corner of the frame of the five at supper. I sat down. Later today, I would see my children. I would begin again to try to be a good father to them. As I finished my glass, I looked at Scott’s card. I couldn’t make out the writing from here, but that didn’t matter. I had read it over so many times since Michael Preston gave me it that I knew it by heart.
‘Four experts had an appointment with an ordinary man. They needed him to ratify their findings or anything they achieved would be meaningless. As they drove to meet him, they knocked down a man on the road. He was dying. If they tried to save him, they might miss their appointment. They decided that their appointment, which concerned all of us, was more important than the life of one man. They drove on to keep their appointment. They did not know that the man they were to meet was the man they had left to die.’
I wished I had more whisky.
Turn the page for an interview with William McIlvanney, author of the Detective Laidlaw trilogy.
‘A crime trilogy so searing it will burn forever in to your memory. McIlvanney is the original Scottish criminal mastermind’
CHRIS BROOKMYRE
Meet Jack Laidlaw, the original damaged detective. When a young woman is found brutally murdered on Glasgow Green, only Laidlaw stands a chance of finding her murderer from among the hard men, gangland villains and self-made moneymen who lurk in the city’s shadows. Winner of the CWA Silver Dagger Award.
£7.99 – ISBN 978 0 85786 986 9
Eck Adamson, an alcoholic vagrant, summons Jack Laidlaw to his deathbed. Probably the only policeman in Glasgow who would bother to respond, Laidlaw sees in Eck’s cryptic last message a clue to the murder of a gangland thug and the disappearance of a student. With stubborn integrity, Laidlaw tracks a seam of corruption that runs from the top to the very bottom of society.
£7.99 – ISBN 978 0 85786 992 0
An interview with William McIlvanney
by Len Wanner
William McIlvanney was born in Kilmarnock in 1936. The fourth of four resourceful miner children, he discovered his love of literature and learning in what used to be known as ‘modest circumstances’. Back then the old phrase denoted the lack of fashionable experience in spite of solvent respectability, but at times it has also connoted a family economy that places its greatest stock in the life of the mind. Such was Mr McIlvanney’s good fortune. At home he soon learned how to invest benign aggression, be it in spirited debate, Kilmarnock Academy, or Glasgow University, and the payoff has been rich. To 15 years of teaching English he has added 15 books in fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose, two Scottish Arts Council Book Awards, two CWA Silver Daggers, a Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award, a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, a Whitbread Award, a Scottish BAFTA, etc.
Yes, Mr McIlvanney is highly prized, but versatility is deemed a division, not an addition of assets, and thus his due fame, the routine repetition of praise, has been delayed by the variety of his writings. Starting with Remedy is None in 1966, he has written such critical and cultural classics as Docherty, Laidlaw, The Big Man, Walking Wounded, Surviving the Shipwreck, and The Kiln, and on every page, be it that of a novel or a short story, an essay or a poem, he has championed the courage of our doubts. Only let his clear, undecorated language linger in the ear, and you begin to hear your own questions, feel as his protagonists do, and see them the way he does: unblinking, unafraid, and understanding. We know these people like ourselves, for although they belong to the past his power of intent makes of them the here and now.
Speaking of which, Mr McIlvanney has done for our time what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did for his. He has created an archetype with an all-access pass to his fictional as well as our factual society. Starting in 1977, his Inspector Jack Laidlaw has led a procession of Scottish writers around the world, and since their shared success, his service to crime fiction has been seen as the source of Tartan Noir. Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch, and Strange Loyalties have enlightened generations of readers, not least as to the term’s intentions and the author’s imitators. This is why he has been charged twice, first with selling out and ever since with deeds of note. Having refused the funds of a series franchise, he has remained commercially undervalued, he has been rated a writer’s writer, and he has given the Scottish crime novel a new lease of life.
The genre’s debt to Mr McIlvanney is immeasurable. The man has shown that there are no formulas, not in literature and not in life. He has done so by mining the gap between purpose and performance, by reminding us that we all live within touching distance of the tough, the troubled, and the tested. That this can seem hopeless is the sign of a sensibility formed when stoicism ruled thoughtful minds; yet reading any one of his genre-defining works leaves one as heartened as the generosity of his spirit. When we met for the following interview in a Glasgow bar, he took my questions like his gin & tonic: slow, stirred, and with a smile. Talking in prose, he tipped the conversation with poetry as if he knew it was loose change and his last suit will have no pockets. Could a man do more to bewilder the public?
According to Ian Rankin, you were supportive of all your literary heirs in that you gave Scottish crime writers their own mongrel tradition. How did that happen?
I had just written Docherty, and although I found all the oral research fascinating, I had contemporary starvation, so I wanted to connect with the present again. This is going to sound terrible, but I heard a voice. It sounds like Joan of Arc, eh? So the first clues I had to Laidlaw were things he was saying. He was quite an abrasive man and I knew I wanted to write about him. As a convert who came to Glasgow from Kilmarnock I always loved the place, so I thought I’d write about contemporary Glasgow from the point of view of somebody who would have to go to the bad places. I didn’t want it to be some Cook’s tour of the city, so I made him a cop. I wrote a first draft of about 40.000 words, and when my agent told me it was a runner I went back to work on that sketch. It was a strange experience. Some of it I loved, but for a long time I didn’t know where it was going.
As for the effect Laidlaw has had, I wasn’t aware of that until people like Val McDermid said to me: “You started
it all.” Did I? I’ve been quite moved that folk regard me as a forerunner of Tartan Noir. In my old age, it’s like getting a pension of esteem you didn’t know you were going to get. Even the main man, Ian Rankin, wrote me a letter when he was living in France, saying something like: “It was you that made me realise these books can be something worthwhile, so I want to dedicate my second book to you.” I lost the bloody letter. I met him years later and apologised, but I felt bad. I could have got a book dedicated to me, and I blew it because I’m so disorganised.
Is there any chance of you writing a fourth Laidlaw?
I don’t know. Sean Connery phoned me once and said: “I’ve got a window for a film. Do you have any ideas?” So I wrote this thing called Streets, a film script of about 80 to 100 pages, and Laidlaw comes into it tangentially. I thought it was quite a good idea, but I’m not telling you what it was in case anybody steals it. Connery shot me with a silver bullet. He said: “My secretary really likes it, but I think it’s more a book than a film.” He’s probably right, so I left it at that. Anyway, there’s that idea and there’s another one for a final Laidlaw, but I don’t know. The way I write is so disorganised. It’s like the laboratory of some Baron Frankenstein, with inert projects lying all over the room, waiting for the lightning flash that will galvanise them into life.
When we were trying to make a film of Laidlaw, we were all sitting in this room, just a wee bit short of the money, and this nice woman said: “Tell you what, let’s just keep the money we have and get Willie to play Laidlaw, instead of trying to hire Connery or some other actor.” I thought: “What a terrific idea!” Then everybody in the room burst out laughing, and I thought: “Well, maybe not.” I’ve always thought that was my chance of fame gone. Too late now, because a tough Glasgow detective with a Zimmer doesn’t quite hack it. To get back to your question, I’m always haunted by the ghosts of what I have not done, and Laidlaw is one of those ghosts. If there’s anything coming, it’ll be the sunset for Laidlaw.
When Laidlaw is asked why darkness fascinates him in Strange Loyalties, he answers: “Maybe because I see it almost everywhere, and a lot of people trying to ignore it.” Do you share his night vision or why did you switch to his narrative vantage point?
It’s very difficult to answer that honestly, Len. I’m not entirely sure why I made it first person. In my awareness, Laidlaw had developed so much as a character that he could speak for himself, and the one thing I hate doing is boring myself while I’m writing – it’s bad enough to bore the reader – so I thought: “I don’t want to write about him in the third person again, and the first person might liberate Laidlaw.”
When Laidlaw came out, a few journalists complained he’s too bright to be a policeman, but I know a lot of bright cops, one of whom was head of the serious crimes squad and he’d been writing poetry all his life. To make it feasible for Laidlaw to read Unamuno, I just let him speak for himself, so in the end it really liberated me. For me, Strange Loyalties is Laidlaw most fully realised, and if there were another one I think it would be first person again.
In the same novel, Strange Loyalties, you mention a pub, ‘The Getaway’. Were you aware enough of Jim Thompson to want to get away from conventional crime fiction?
Not much, really. I hadn’t read much other crime fiction and most of what I had read I was dubious about. Agatha Christie? Even Raymond Chandler, whom I love, made me think: “Wait a minute. This detective’s head is made of ferro-concrete.” When my detective gets battered, he won’t just walk on. Also, in a ‘whodunnit’ the question ‘Who did it?’ takes over everything and buries a lot of valuable stuff in its pursuit, so I made it a ‘whydunnit’. In the beginning of Laidlaw you know who did it, so the questions you ask are: “Why did he do it?” And: “What’s going to happen to him?”
So, if I’m right about the gestation of Laidlaw, I would say I was aware enough of crime fiction to want to do something different from what I’d seen. It was a new area which fascinated me and which I thought was underdeveloped. I’m not saying that I could grandly develop it, but I could at least try to suggest that there’s more here. It seemed to me that it usually fought as a flyweight and it could fight at least as a middleweight.
Were you worried there might not be more here for much longer if you wrote a Laidlaw a year or how do you explain your ‘arid periods’?
They were arid in terms of book production, but I don’t think that’s what writing is about. Writing is about writing. The book production is very much a secondary issue, so when the publisher said to me: “Do one a year.” I thought: “Are you kidding? That’s like a factory.” I’m not saying that good writers don’t do that, but I didn’t want to do that. I was trying to develop and enlarge myself in those intervening years, but it’s also fair to say that I can be lazy, and to me the hassle of a book is quite severe. It takes a lot out of me, and whenever I write a book I rediscover my lack of confidence. For me, every book I’ve written has been a bit of a trauma where I thought: “This is maybe bad. Who’s going to want to read this?” I’ve never lost that.
Alan Sharp once wrote an essay about Scottish football. When Billy Bremner failed to score and take us to the next level, he was down on his knees with his face buried in his hands, and Alan said: “I know that moment. It’s a Scottish moment – the moment you’re found out.” I suppose I’ve always had a bit of that: “This time, this time they’re going to see the emperor is bollock naked here.” Besides, although I’m not saying it’s feasible or that I came remotely close to doing it, I always wanted to believe in the next book in advance and know: “Something new is here, some progress has been made.”
Is the joy of writing its autonomy?
Yes, but it’s not autonomy in a self-confident sense; it’s autonomy in a dangerous sense. You realise that you could fall on your arse every time you do it, and it’s that risk that is exciting – the defiance of the risk. Life is a haphazard means of precipitating fiction for me. I come to a place and think I’d like to write something that accommodates these things. I try to create something of interest, and if I’m lucky I create moments of truth, but it’s always a risk.
Is it fair to say that you and your characters are preoccupied with the shifting roles in their lives – who am I here?
I suppose so. I’ve spent my whole life intermittently asking myself that. I think if you don’t do that you miss half the truth. If you don’t realise you’re playing multiple roles and ask yourself which one is truly you, you miss the game. In a lot of ways life is a performance. That doesn’t mean you’re pretending, but that you’re adopting a stance more confident than the circumstances allow, and it loses a frisson if you don’t admit you’re pirouetting on thin ice. Some game to play this – it’s great fun and I love it. Sometimes, the ice will go, but you live with that. You constantly re-examine yourself, and you’re lucky if you give yourself a pass mark, but you go on. There’s the constant asking of “who am I here?”
Is literature about faith to you and your characters whose high hopes end in high tragedy?
Absolutely. To me, Shakespeare is a kind of locum God. In the absence of a God I can believe in, he explains human nature to me more than anybody else I’ve ever read. I don’t think life’s about success; it’s about the honour of the endeavour. I’m old-fashioned enough to believe in honour. You live towards others as honestly as you can, and if you live honourably, you go to your grave on your own terms. To me, part of the greatness of people is taking on the bad stuff and not visiting it upon anybody else. Wilfully inflicting unnecessary pain on others pygmifies the species, although I must have done my share of that. Somebody like Laidlaw is a massively imperfect man, and he might visit it on folk that he thinks are cheating at the game, but he doesn’t invade decent people’s lives with it. I don’t know if he’s a tragic figure, but he’s a tortured figure. He’s trying to be honest in the midst of endless pomposity and dishonesty. He’s an awkward man, but I like him, and I agree with him most of th
e time. If we had the courage of our doubts, not of our convictions, the millennium could be here.
You’ve described detective work as “a balancing act of subtle mutual respects. You hoped to give small to get back big.” How has that worked out for Laidlaw and yourself?
I’ve certainly got back big. The man who organises the Glasgow Book Festival invited me to speak next year because it’s been 35 years since Laidlaw came out. It was like saying: “Dear Willie, do you realise how old you are?” Not until you mentioned it, no. I had no idea that I would be as lucky as for serious writers of crime fiction to say I was helpful in releasing the genre in Scotland, although I’m not sure they’re not being too generous. It’s nice of them to think so, but it hasn’t made me think I can sit back and rely on it. It matters because it gives you the energy or the chutzpah to go back into that place where you write and where you’re on your own, but it doesn’t matter once you’re back in that padded cell, trying to rediscover the honesty of what you’re hoping to say.
When did you first see yourself as a writer?
When I was 17, I went to the headmaster and said: “I’m giving up Greek, Sir.” – “Why?” – “Because it’s interfering with my reading.” He said: “Don’t you mean you’re reading is interfering with your Greek?” – “No, Sir. If I’m not going to be a writer, I’m not going to be anything.” Another time, I was sitting in a library at Glasgow University, revising for a history exam with a friend, Frank Donnelly, when a wee latticed window suddenly blew open. It was a weird feeling, so I took out my notebook and wrote it down. When I looked up, Frank was staring at me and said: “I think you should watch that, Willie. They could take you away for that.” It was a compulsion I had then, and it’s developed, but I don’t mind it because it was part of my almost lifelong compulsion to try to be a writer.
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