• ©
  • Iain McLean

William McIlvanney

Born:
  • Kilmarnock, Scotland
Publishers:

Biography

Scottish novelist William McIlvanney was born in 1936 in Kilmarnock, the son of a miner.

He graduated from Glasgow University and worked as an English teacher between 1960 and 1975. His first book, Remedy is None, was published in 1966 and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Docherty (1975), a moving portrait of a miner whose courage and endurance is tested during the depression, won the Whitbread Novel Award. The Big Man (1985), is the story of Dan Scoular, an unemployed man who turns to bare-knuckle fights to make a living. Both novels feature typical McIlvanney characters - tough, often violent, men locked in a struggle with their own nature and background. The Kiln (1996), is the story of Tam Docherty, the grandson of the hero of Docherty. It won the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award. The Big Man (1985) was made into a film starring Liam Neeson. Laidlaw (1977) and The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) are both crime novels.

William McIlvanney is also an acclaimed poet, and is the author of The Longships in Harbour: Poems (1970) and Surviving the Shipwreck (1991), which also contains pieces of journalism, including an essay about T. S. Eliot. His short story 'Dreaming' (published in Walking Wounded in 1989) was filmed by BBC Scotland in 1990 and won a BAFTA. His brother is the sports journalist Hugh McIlvanney.

William McIlvanney's latest novel is Weekend (2006).

William McIlvanney died on 5th December 2015.

Critical perspective

William McIlvanney is one of the prodigiously talented McIlvanney brothers who, along with his journalist sibling Hugh, have played a significant part in Scottish cultural life for more than 30 years.

William McIlvanney was Visiting Professor in the School of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde, where he taught the emerging generation of Scottish writers. His work might be characterised in three ways. Firstly, there is his novelistic output, in particular his detective stories based around the eponymous character, detective constable Jack Laidlaw. These stories are in keeping with a tradition of British thriller writing, and stand at the opening of the later proliferation of crime writing in Scotland which Elmore Leonard has described as ‘tartan noir’. Secondly, in his short stories and in other novels such as The Big Man (1985), there is a more considered literary and lyrical McIlvanney who has explored the Scottish male psyche and the way in which it forms and is formed by violence. Thirdly, his journalistic prose has offered a profound reflection upon the state of Scotland from the point of view of a certain socialist intellectual, documenting the drift of Scottish culture from an industrial base to late Capitalism.

It is remarkable that the limited geographic space of Scotland and in particular the even more limited geographic space of the motorway corridor between Glasgow and Edinburgh has given rise to such an abundance of detective fiction. There is a tradition of Scottish thriller writing which predates McIlvanney, and includes John Buchan and Robert Louis Stevenson. However, McIlvanney was the first Scottish writer to combine the emerging interest in crime writing with a depiction of Scottish working-class life and its violent conditions, as exemplified in novels such as Archie Hind’s Dear Green Place and Alexander McArthur’s No Mean City.  McIlvanney’s first novel, Remedy is None (1966), won the 1967 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. His second, A Gift from Nessus (1968), won a Scottish Arts Council Award in 1969.  His third, Docherty (1975), won the prestigious Whitbread Novel Award, but it was his fourth novel, Laidlaw (1977), which secured his international reputation.  In the character of Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw we can see all the anti-heroic characteristics which have shaped tartan noir and, more generally, British crime writing, since its publication.  Laidlaw is a loner with an antipathetical relationship to authority and who is motivated by an idea of justice which occasionally exceeds the boundaries of the law.  Here one can see the basis for characters such as Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus.  However, Laidlaw is also a humanist manqué, he does not accept that there are ‘fairies or monsters’; only people caught up in circumstances beyond their control and shaped by socio-economic forces not of their own choosing.  In this respect, we might consider McIlvanney’s writing (reminiscent of The Hard Man) as part of a tradition of Scottish Socialist Realism.  However, politicised as it may be, this is no agit prop.  Laidlaw has a considerable amount in common with Kafka’s K or Joyce’s Bloom as he wanders the mean streets of Glasgow in search of the truth.

With a writer such as McIlvanney, one can begin to see why Scotland should be such a ripe locale for detective fiction, and why its writers should speak to readers in Europe.  Firstly, the land of Macbeth is propitious for murder.  The dark nights and dark psyches depicted by McIlvanney are suggestive of the scene of considerable crime.  McIlvanney (and those who write after him) construct a Glasgow as bleak as any modernist or postmodernist distopia.  His interest is not in the macro level configurations of a city and its political and public spaces, but in the lives led in back streets by characters sketched in charcoal with nicotine stained fingers.  His is the Glasgow of smoke-filled bars, newspaper stands, public buses, cheap hotel lobbies, dark street corners, empty parkland and dimly-lit night clubs.  It is a warren as complex as any labyrinth imagined by Dedalus and as evasive as any Castle encountered by a confused Kafka.  Laidlaw, like a Scottish bladerunner, occupies his own imagined space, all the more powerful for its recognisable referents and familiar auditory patterns.  McIlvanney expands his writing beyond the formula of the detective novel to offer a profound engagement with process, temporality and human agency.  Laidlaw imagines that it is a mistake to think of murder as the culmination of an aberrant sequence of events.  It is only that for the victim.  For the living, those who live on in the half-light of unknowing, it is only the beginning of a sequence of events which can lead to the undoing of lives that still have to be lived.

The opening of Laidlaw provides us with an opportunity to read several salient aspects of McIlvanney’s writing.  It begins:

'Running was a strange thing.  The sound was your feet slapping the pavement.  The lights of passing cars batted 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.
 A voice with a cap on said, "Where’s the fire, son?"
 Running was a dangerous thing.  It was a billboard advertising panic, a neon sign spelling guilt.  Walking was safe.  You could wear strolling like a mask.  Stroll.  Strollers are normal.'

The first thing we might note is that the voice here is considered and literary. It does not invoke the wise-cracking conventions of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, nor does it turn to demotic Scots. The vernacular is always inside inverted commas.  It plays on several stylistic features characteristic of the European novel, notably here the use of style indirect libre as a way of blurring the boundaries between the third person narration and the interior monologue of the character it describes, moving between the complex sentence and the flustered reporting of 'Stroll' and so on.  However, this passage is one which exemplifies the work of the book in general and of McIlvanney’s characters in general. It is concerned with reading. It reads the body language of the runner for signs of the symptomatic, working from signifier to signified to reconstruct meaning and to work towards truth.  All of McIlvanney’s characters are good readers, not only the detective who operates a hermeneutics of suspicion but all the anti-heroes who engage critically with the world around them, taking nothing at face value, decoding the world as they attempt to make sense of it for themselves and their reader. 

Dr M. McQuillan, 2003

Bibliography

Weekend
Scottish Writers Talking: George Mackay Brown, Jessie Kesson, Norman MacCaig, William McIlvanney, David Toulmin
The Kiln
Surviving the Shipwreck
Strange Loyalties
Walking Wounded
In Through the Head
The Big Man
These Words: Weddings and After - an essay and poetry
The Papers of Tony Veitch
Laidlaw
Docherty
Landscapes and Figures
The Longships in Harbour: Poems
A Gift from Nessus
Remedy is None

Awards

2013
Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award for Writing
2013
Saltire Society Fletcher of Saltoun Award
1996
Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award
1992
Scottish Arts Council Award
1992
Glasgow Herald People's Prize
1990
BAFTA
1990
Glasgow Herald People's Prize
1983
Crime Writers' Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction
1977
Crime Writers' Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction
1975
Scottish Arts Council Book Award
1975
Whitbread Novel Award
1968
Scottish Arts Council Book Award
1967
Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize