Strange Loyalties by William McIlvanney
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Mr Bumble got it wrong. The law isn’t an ass. It’s a lot more sinister than that. The law is a devious, conniving bastard."

I read William McIlvanney's THE BIG MAN years ago, when it came out, but didn't get round to reading his Laidlaw novels for many years afterwards, only reading the second novel, THE PAPERS OF TONY VEITCH, when I discovered Alan Parks' 1970s Glasgow set series starting with Bloody January. Even then, it took Ian Rankin's completion of McIlvanney's unfinished final Laidlaw story, THE DARK REMAINS, to remind me that I had never completed the original trilogy, an error I have now corrected. Why did it take so long?

‘When a finger points at the moon,’ a Paris graffito had once said, ‘the fool looks at the finger.’

Written, unlike the preceding two novels, in the first person, STRANGE LOYALTIES is the distillation of Jack Laidlaw. We get right into his head and it is a fascinating, sometimes frightening, place to be. Where we previously witnessed Laidlaw's sometimes contradictory actions we now hear the thinking behind them, Jack's acknowledgment of the flaws in his personality and his musings on the reasons and causes of them. Ostensibly the story of Laidlaw's investigation into his brother's sudden death, the detective is simultaneously intimately involved yet somehow detached from events; Laidlaw commentates on and analyses his own, and other characters actions and motivations even as they occur.

As easy as it is to understand how the Laidlaw books laid the foundations for 'Tartan Noir', influencing Rankin, Parks, McDermid and others, it is perplexing how some critics could have derided such literate, articulate writing as mere 'crime fiction' when these books say more about the human condition than many 'literary' novels could ever hope to. It took me far longer than it should have to get here but I am so thankful I did, and as STRANGE LOYALTIES links directly back to THE BIG MAN, I will be re-reading McIlvanney's story about Dan Scoular at the earliest opportunity.

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