GRITTY. It’s a word habitually attached to Scottish literature, particularly its crime genre. However, even if it sounds counter-intuitive on the surface, you can be gritty in graceful prose.
Such was this week’s Icon, William McIlvanney. Feted by Allan Massie, no mean wordsmith himself, as the finest Scottish novelist of his generation, he has also been described as “Scotland’s Camus”, as in Albert of that ilk, French writer of The Rebel.
McIlvanney is also often called “the godfather of Tartan Noir”. However, the novelist was conflicted by the accolade, not ungrateful but somehow feeling it wasn’t really him. His concern, as the Daily Telegraph put it, was morality, not sensation.
Apart from anything else, though billed as a crime writer, he also wrote literary novels, short stories, essays, poetry. As close friend Ian Bell, Scotland’s greatest journalist, put it in a tribute shortly before his own tragically premature death: “Those who say ‘crime writer’ in the obituaries forget a poet.”
William Angus McIlvanney was born in Kilmarnock on November 25, 1936, the youngest of four children. His father, a former miner who’d taken part in the General Strike a decade earlier, was an intelligent man “educated below his ability”. He had, according to Willie, “a PhD in rage”.
Willie’s mother recited poetry and was a rock, prompting in McIlvanney an undying respect for women who held families together. And this loquacious family did not shy away from argument and discussion. The writer’s elder brother became the legendary sports journalist Hugh McIlvanney. William’s son, Liam McIlvanney, is a highly regarded crime novelist.
Willie was educated at Hillhead Primary School and Kilmarnock Academy, where he was a star pupil and edited the school magazine Goldberry. At the University of Glasgow, he graduated MA (Hons) in English in 1960, despite deploring the “mechanistic shallowness” of academic life.
The write stuff
McIlvanney worked as an English teacher, first at Irvine Royal Academy, then at Greenwood Academy, Dreghorn. An inspirational educator, he maintained links to teaching throughout his writing career and held creative writing posts at Grenoble, Vancouver, Strathclyde and Aberdeen universities.
His first book, Remedy Is None, was published in 1966 and concerned a student whose father scrimped and saved to send him to university but was now dying of cancer. The novel gained enthusiastic reviews, elicited allusions to Hamlet, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize.
However, like its successor, A Gift From Nessus, it sold poorly.
Undaunted, in 1975, McIlvanney published Docherty. Later voted one of the top 10 Scottish novels of all time, it portrayed a miner in a close-knit but declining community whose dignity and endurance are tested during hard times.
Despite some English readers finding the Scots language difficult, Docherty won the Whitbread Prize, prompting McIlvanney to leave his post of assistant headmaster and concentrate on his writing.
Laidlaw followed in 1977, a venture into crime that was not universally welcomed. One teacher in a Glasgow bar told him he’d disgraced himself. But McIlvanney maintained that Laidlaw was “not a whodunnit but a whydunnit”, and that its eponymous central character was “not just an inspector of crime” but “an inspector of society”.
With The Papers Of Tony Veitch (1983) and Strange Loyalties (1991), Laidlaw formed a trilogy of crime novels featuring Glasgow gumshoe Inspector Jack Laidlaw. Laidlaw is a moody loner, leary of authority but with his own strong sense of justice as applied to Glasgow’s seedier backstreets.
Needless to say, he drinks, and if you opened the top drawer of his desk you’d find … well-thumbed editions of Camus and Kierkegaard. Obviously.
Laying down the law
CRIME novelist Doug Johnstone said the trilogy formed “a hard-bitten blueprint for all Scottish crime fiction to come”. The Guardian said Laidlaw “laid the blueprint for Rebus and co”.
But, as we have seen, there was more to McIlvanney than crime. The Big Man (1985) is the story of an unemployed miner in a rundown Ayrshire town who, amid a struggle to understand his own nature, turns to bare-knuckle fighting to make a living.
The novel was adapted into a film in 1990, directed by David Leland, and featuring Liam Neeson, Billy Connolly and, er, Hugh Grant.
The Kiln (1996) is a coming-of-age story about Tam Docherty, grandson of the preceding Docherty, who looks back from middle age to the golden summer of his youth. It was widely hailed as a masterpiece.
In 1986, McIlvanney wrote and narrated the BBC Scotland football documentary Only A Game? He also wrote regularly for newspapers, notably The Glasgow Herald, Scotland on Sunday and Observer Scotland.
In a memorial service tribute, Herald writer Hugh MacDonald said MacIlvanney’s journalism was “never a distant cousin to the fiction” and that he was “akin to Dickens and Balzac in writing about a place and its people, whether for fiction or for newspaper”.
Then there was the poetry, in collections such as The Longships In Harbour (1970), These Words – Weddings And After (1984), In Through The Head (1988), and Surviving The Shipwreck (1991), the last-named containing also an essay about T. S. Eliot and poetry’s elitism.
McIlvaney was a dedicated socialist, back when that noble creed was about liberation of the proletariat and not a middle-class smorgasbord of cultural curiosities. He lamented New Labour’s shift towards the centre and, like many on the Left, switched to Scottish independence as a means to an end.
In 2015, which turned out to be the last year of his life, McIlvanney said he wanted to write “three or four new things” before his career ended.
However, perspicaciously he added: “[I]f you’re a betting man don’t put a bet on it”.
William McIlvanney died at his home in Glasgow on December 5, 2015, at the age of 79, after a short illness. His final novel, The Dark Remains, was completed by Ian Rankin and released in September 2021.
(Image: Colin Mearns)
Among many heartfelt tributes, Scotland’s then-first minister Nicola Sturgeon, who also hails from Ayrshire, said: “His writing meant so much to me when I was growing up.”
The aforementioned Rankin praised “a truly inspired and inspiring author and an absolute gent”.
A Daily Telegraph obituary said: “Many authors are admired. Many are respected. Few are loved as he was, for what they are as well as for what they have written. Scotland will be a poorer place without him, diminished by his departure, though enriched by his memory and his work.”
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