Word: laidlaw
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that the only Scottish murder mystery is Macbeth. Set in contemporary Glasgow, it has not a bonny brae nor a twirling tartan to its name; but it offers an assortment of colorful underworld types who demonstrate that tough talk is not softened when it is spoken with a burr. Laidlaw is also the first police procedural by Scottish Author William McIlvanney, 41, who has written three earlier novels and a book of poems, none published in the U.S. Like the whiskies of his native land, Mcllvanney's debut here comes after appropriate aging...
Although Mcllvanney keeps this question hanging almost to the end, his focus is not on suspense but on a close-knit society's reaction to criminal outrage. Detective-Inspector Jack Laidlaw is assigned to catch the murderer, but he resents the assumption-especially rife among his fellow policemen-that this process is just the same as caging an animal. He argues, instead, that "monstrosity's made by false gentility. You don't get one without the other. No fairies, no monsters. Just people...
...Laidlaw is no bleeding heart...
...hate violence so much," he tells a colleague, "I don't intend to let anybody practise it on me with impunity." When an enemy on the force confesses aloud an urge to "rearrange" Laidlaw's face, Laidlaw replies: "You should fight that. It's called a death-wish." As Mcllvanney pieces him together, Laidlaw emerges as a jumble of contradictions, a sensitive, intelligent soul performing brutal, repetitive work. Indeed, some of Laidlaw's ruminations sound like heavier luggage than a functioning police man ought to carry: "What's murder but a willed absolute, an invented...
Lilting Music. Such outbursts of bookishness threaten to tip the novel into a treatise. Fortunately, Mcllvanney always manages to regain his balance by hitting the streets. His evocations of the old city seem etched in ancient stone and rubbed with coal dust. Laidlaw runs his investigation from a fading hotel: "The architecture was Victorian and very dirty. It had been cunningly equipped with curlicues and excrescences, the chief effect of which was to make it an enormous gin for drifting soot and aerial muck. It stood now half-devoured by its catch, weighted with years of Glasgow...