The Papers of Tony Veitch

Its place in Jack Laidlaw

The Papers of Tony Veitch is book 2 in the Jack Laidlaw series. It follows Laidlaw. It is followed by Strange Loyalties. See the full Jack Laidlaw reading order.

Jack Laidlaw is a Glasgow detective who reads Camus and Kierkegaard between interrogations, drinks in the city's roughest pubs to stay fluent in its underworld, and treats every case as a moral argument he's obliged to have with himself as much as with the criminals he's chasing. William McIlvanney introduced him in Laidlaw (1977), a novel now widely credited as the founding text of Tartan Noir -- the harder, more socially and psychologically serious strain of Scottish crime writing that later produced Ian…