Having recently written an article about the much-loved festival Bloody Scotland, I thought it only fair to talk about the genre of crime writing that the festival was celebrating: the clearly popular but at times divisive genre of Scottish crime fiction.
It all seemed to start in 1977 when headmaster-turned-novelist William McIlvanney published a book called Laidlaw. A gritty noir-style detective story set in Glasgow about a violent murder, and the cynical, hard-drinking, troubled-marriage detective assigned to the case. (Sounds familiar? It should.) It surprised McIlvanney’s audience, especially since he had just won an award for Docherty, a historical novel about a Scottish mining family.
Fast-forward ten years and it’s here that McIlvanney’s choice seems to bear fruit. It’s 1987 and an Edinburgh-based novelist named Ian Rankin publishes the first of what would become a long-running series of books about a detective called John Rebus. Also around this time, the emerging genre was getting the first of its many prominent female authors including journalist-turned-novelist Val MacDermid who would go on to have success with her Tony Hill and Carol Jordan series. And this genre now had a name. Who coined it depends on whom you ask, Rankin or James ‘Demon Dog of Crime Fiction’ Elroy – but the name one of them came up with was… ‘Tartan Noir’.
It was clear that this was a genre that in the right hands could prosper, and not just on the printed page.
Back in 1983 STV had started broadcasting a Glasgow-based police procedural called Taggart that was born of a one-off special named Killer and returned as a series from 1985. If you want an idea of how successful it was, it ran until 2010 and is a strong contender for longest-running UK crime drama (it’s either that or The Bill). I watched one episode, found it a bit of a slow burn… and Laidlaw is little more than pre-Taggart on paper.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, writers such as Denise Mina and Alex Grey were also starting to make names for themselves. Grey was also instrumental in creating the Bloody Scotland festival where I saw David Baldacci in 2019.
Now that I’ve given you a history of the genre, I will now run it into the ground.
I know that my saying that Scottish crime writing receives a lot of attention and praise, especially in Scotland, is not going to come as a surprise to anyone. But here is the problem, it’s often wildly over-hyped as one of the greatest things since the invention of the wheel.
The reality is that Scottish crime books have most of the same character types and clichés as an English or American crime novel. While the latter appear to have great international appeal with memorable characters and plots, Scottish crime fiction does not, with too many basic plots, very similar clichéd protagonists and uninteresting side characters. And when the books get rather graphic, that’s probably down to the all-too familiar violent history of cities like Glasgow.
If I can come back to international appeal for a minute, it seems that Scottish crime writing has very little. I have spoken to several people who claim to be crime fans but they only read books set in Scotland. I ask them why and they usually say something along the lines of, “I live there, so I can visualise it better”. I believe one of the joys of reading is to get away from it all into a world that a writer of talent has spent months or even years creating; to experience places you would stand a rare chance of going to or never go to at all. But I guess some are content to escape into a world that is really within walking or driving distance.
And that is a kind of appeal I can’t help but look at and find rather peculiar.
In the end, it thrives, it has its devoted fans. I tried it and didn’t like it. But I did give it more chances than I probably should have.
(If you’re at all curious I read the first two Laidlaw’s and Never Somewhere Else by Alex Grey.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to enjoy some real writers, Joseph Heller and Charles Dickens.