William McIlvanney
Photo Credit: Ian Atkinson
William McIlvanney is the author of the award-winning Laidlaw trilogy, featuring Glasgow’s original maverick detective. Both Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch gained Silver Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association, while the third in the series, Strange Loyalties, won the Glasgow Herald’s People’s Prize. He died in December 2015.
Strange Loyalties is the third book in the Laidlaw Trilogy.
Strange Loyalties
The remarkable conclusion to the Laidlaw series which launched a genre, from the godfather of Scottish crime fiction
“He’s not a copper who happens to be a man. He’s a man who happens to be a copper, and he carries that weight with him everywhere he goes.”
“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