William McIlvanney
Photo Credit: Ian Atkinson
William McIlvanney’s first novel, Remedy is None, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and with Docherty he won the Whitbread Award for Fiction. Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch, the first two books in the Laidlaw trilogy, both gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association while the third in the series, Strange Loyalties, won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize. Following his death in December 2015 the McIlvanney Prize was established; awarded to the best new Scottish crime book at Bloody Scotland, Scotland’s International Crime Writing Festival.
Strange Loyalties
The remarkable conclusion to the Laidlaw series which launched a genre, from the godfather of Scottish crime fiction
“Laidlaw brought Glasgow to life more viscerally than any book I had read before: the good and the bad, the language and the humour, the violence and the drinking … This book made me realise that pacey, streetwise thrillers didn’t have to be American: we had mean streets enough of our own.”
The Guardian asked great crime writers to pick their favourite crime novels, and Christopher Brookmyre thinks you should be reading William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw.
“I don’t like questions. They invent the answers. The real answers are discovered, before you even know what the question is”
Docherty named number four in top ten list of favourite Scottish novels
SBT
Scottish Book Trust