Strange Loyalties: William McIlvanney in words and a picture

Your humble blog keeper (right) explains things
to William McIlvanney at Crimefest 2013, Bristol.
Photo courtesy of Ali Karim

. Once again I'm rereading a novel by William McIlvanney, and once again I am struck immediately by how different he is from the legion of crime writers who acknowledge his influence.

This time the novel is Strange Loyalties (1991), third of McIlvanney's three Laidlaw novels and, like its predecessors, Laidlaw and The Papers of Tony Veitch, rereleased in trade paperback by Canongate.

A hard-drinking detective or police officer comes slowly to himself after a binge and boy, does his head hurt. You're read that scene a few hundred times, but probably not the way McIlvanney writes it. Here's the opening of Strange Loyalties:

"I woke up with a head like a rodeo. Isn't it painful having fun? Mind you, last night hadn't been about enjoyment, just whisky as anaesthetic. Now it was wearing off, the pain was worse. It always is."

First, McIlvanney comes with a funny, inventive, eye-catching way of saying, "I was drunk, and my head hurt." That's a good way to grab a reader's attention, a good thing to do in a novel's first sentence. Second, the humor is a welcome change from the pain and self-pity with which many another crime writer endows such first-person hangovers.

Third, McIllvanney immediately leavens the fun with somber self-realization that to me, at least, tugs at the heartstrings without getting maudlin.  If you've never read the Laidlaw novels, read that opening again. Don't you want to know the character who thinks those lines? Doesn't that mix make Laidlaw seem more real, more human?

So, who is like unto William McIlvanney? Allan Guthrie probably comes closest in his mix of humor and compassion, but even that top-flight crime writer doesn't do it with the concentration of his fellow Scotsman McIlvanney. Ken Bruen does something like it in Priest, though its characters lean more toward martyrdom and away from humor.

Ian Rankin calls it doubtful that he'd be a crime writer without McIlvanney's influence but, other than that McIlvanney's Laidlaw and Rankin's Rebus both work the streets of a tough Scottish city, I don't see striking similarities between the two. So I'll dump the question in your laps, dear readers: Which crime writers best combine humor and compassion? Which authors, if you want to put the question this way, will make you laugh and cry in the same book?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

William McIlvanney: "Like a suitcase with doors"

When is comes to setting a scene, William McIlvanney has a way of doing what a hundred other crime writers have done worse.

How many crime writers have created single, divorced, or recently split-up police officers or detectives? How many of those writers have given those maritally troubled officers a messy house or apartment as an objective correlative of the character's troubled emotional state? The number is incalculable.

Here's how McIlvanney sets such a scene in The Papers of Tony Veitch, second of his three great Laidlaw novels, now rereleased by Canongate:

"(H)e recognized the inimitable decor of Milligan's poky flat, a kind of waiting room baroque.

"The walls were dun and featureless, the furniture was arranged with all the homeyness of a second-hand sale room and clothes were littered everywhere. It wasn't a room so much as a suitcase with doors."

There's more to McIlvanney than a Chandlerian flair for metaphors, of course, his empathy for all his characters, for one, and his sharp, wry, affectionate portraits of Glasgow life, for another. But the metaphors help. They make McIlvanney's novels into verbal champagne, and they say old things in fresh hew ways. And that's where you come in, readers. What crime or other writers render hoary, obligatory scenes in such fresh and clever ways that they almost make you forget the scenes are hoary and obligatory?

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(Browse some previous McIlvanney posts at Detectives Beyond Borders. Click the link, then scroll down.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

William McIlvanney in a nutshell

My current reading is a hodgepodge of crime and noncrime. Here's a highlight from the crime part, The Papers of Tony Veitch, second of William McIlvanney's Laidlaw novels:

 "It was Glasgow on a Friday night, the city of stares. ... There were a few knots of people looking up at the series of windows where train departures were posted. They looked as if they were trying to threaten their own destinations into appearing." 

The line needs no analysis, but you'll get one anyway. The description's humor does nothing to soften its portrait of Glasgow. That's McIlvanney in a nutshell.

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Cover blurbs often compare crime writers to Raymond Chandler, and the comparisons are generally superficial, fatuous or, I suspect, outright tongue-in-cheek. McIlvanney's emotional engagement with Glasgow, on the other hand, is one of the few facets of any crime novelist's writing that really is in the spirit of Chandler's with Los Angeles.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

How William McIlvanney beats the stereotypes

The first thing that strikes me on my second reading of William McIlvanney's 1977 novel Laidlaw is how much better the book is than the many crime novels that have followed it in form but fallen short in spirit and execution.

Here's how an outline of Laidlaw might begin:

First chapter: Narrated from killer’s point of view as he flees murder scene.

Second chapter: Crusty police officer sits at his desk, feeling bleak.

Third chapter: Father of missing girl feels frustrated and powerless.

Forget, for a moment, that those tropes may not have been so tired back in 1977. The question on the floor is why McIlvanney's versions seem so fresh now that Canongate books has rereleased Laidlaw in 2013 (along with its follow-ups, The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties), other than that McIlvanney avoids the deadly trap of setting the inside-the-killer's-head chapter in italic type.

Start with compassion and humor. End with such telling detail that one feels one is reading novel observation rather that obligatory place-holders. Here's how the novel opens:

"Running was a strange thing. The sound was your feet slapping the pavement. The lights of passing cars batted your eyeballs. ..."

Find me a better description of alienation than that, of feeling inside one's body and removed from it at the same time. If you do, I bet it won't end on McIlvanney's humorous note:

"A voice with a cap on said. `Where's the fire, son?'"

Yes, quibblers, a voice with a cap on, a convincing subjective description of how the world might appear to a panicked young man fleeing through a crowded city's streets. Subjectivity here translates into empathy, which, in turn makes itself felt in McIlvanney's compassion for his characters, even the most unpleasant. That compassion, perhaps even more than his depictions of hard city (Glasgow), marks out his affinity with Goodis, Guthrie, and other great names in noir.

Then there's McIlvanney understated humor, of which the following bit about a clownish drunk is just one of my favorites (and it gives a nice picture of McIlvanney's Glasgow at the same time):

"He was circulating haphazardly. trying different tables. In Hollywood films it's gypsy fiddlers. In Glasgow pubs it isn't. With that instinct for catastrophe some drunk men have, he settled for a table where three men were sitting. Two of them, Bud Lawson and Airchie Stanley, looked like trouble. The third one looked like much worse trouble."

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Here's an example of McIlvanney's compassion for his characters. Here's another that also exemplifies how McIlvanney gets beyond a crime-fiction trope by digging deeper into it. In this case, the trope is that of the introspective detective.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

"Sort of an anarchist with syndicalist tendencies," plus William McIlvanney

Elisha Cook Jr.
38 years before
"Hammett"

This post's title is a bit of dialogue from Wim Wenders' movie Hammett, based on Joe Gores' novel of the same name. That the line is uttered by Elisha Cook Jr., such a memorable presence in The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Phantom Lady, still zesty at age 78 in 1982, makes a fine line even more delicious:

"Are you really a Wobblie?" 

 "Ah, no. That's just Hammett talking. What I am now is sort of an anarchist with syndicalist tendencies."

Cook appeared in Hammett forty years after he began making his name as a Hollywood fall guy. What are your favorite late-career cameo appearances?

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Speaking of good lines, Canongate's rerelease of William McIlvanney's three Laidlaw novels (Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch, Strange Loyalties) may be the happiest event since this blog started, and one of the very few that deserve the name of event.

Laidlaw appeared in 1977, the other two in 1983 and 1991, and their author has since become recognized as a father figure to Scottish crime writers who have followed.  He has begun appearing at crime fiction festivals, including Crimefest 2013, celebrated by all and a genial presence for a literary demigod.

The Laidlaw books are the answer to anyone who needs proof that literary fiction can be tough, gritty, and unpretentious, or that crime writing can be beautiful, affecting, and a portrait of its time and place that deserves to last. (The place is Glasgow. That Glasgow is McIlvanney's adopted city is of interest. Does being a nonnative sharpen his perception?)

In addition to the books, McIlvanney has a website called Personal Dispatches, where bits of his writing appear from time to time, including a recent discussion with Sean Connery.

 © Peter Rozovsky 2013

Introspective detectives

Two books I pulled out of the pile more or less by chance this week share the quality of having an unusually introspective detective.

William McIlvanney's Laidlaw novels are extended meditations, digressions and observations punctuated occasionally by bits of action, and McIlvanney has the writing chops to pull it off.  Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza's Rio de Janeiro police inspector protagonist also muses on the nature of his work — no surprise, perhaps, from a character named Spinosa.

Here's a bit of McIlvanney's Strange Loyalties:

"I've seen it go about its business all too often — all those trials in which you can watch the bemusement of the accused grow while the legal charade goes on around him. You can watch his eyes cloud, panic and finally silt up with surrender. He doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. He can no longer recognize what he's supposed to have done. Only they know what they're talking about. It's their game. He's just the ball."

And here's a passage from Garcia-Roza's Blackout:

"Neither the question not the possible replies were anything like a real investigation, but they did increase the number of conjectures that told him in his own head something was about to begin. He still couldn't call it an investigation: it was more like an intellectual stew combining very acute observations, subtle rationalizations, and delirious ideas. He considered it to be something like prethought."

Who's your favorite introspective detective?

© Peter Rozovsky 2011