Word: laidlaw
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...LAIDLAW by WILLIAM MclLVANNEY 224 pages. Pantheon...
...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...
...London's Hambros Bank Ltd., largest merchant bank in Europe, who helped triple his 126-year-old family firm's assets (now more than $500 million) by pushing beyond traditional sterling markets into such U.S. ventures as a $5,000,000 partnership in Wall Street's Laidlaw & Co., a $20 million share in Manhattan's Pan Am Building, and a brisk, $70 million annual trade in British car imports; of a heart attack; in Knebworth, England...