Jack Laidlaw

About the Jack Laidlaw series

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 Rankin's own Inspector Rebus. The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) and Strange Loyalties (1991) completed a trilogy that treats Glasgow itself, its poverty, machismo and class fractures, as inseparable from the crimes committed in it.

McIlvanney died in 2015 with a fourth Laidlaw novel left as a partial handwritten manuscript. Ian Rankin -- who has spoken for years about McIlvanney's influence on his own career -- completed it from that draft and his notes, publishing it in 2021 as The Dark Remains. Set before the events of Laidlaw, it works as a prequel showing how Laidlaw earned the reputation the original trilogy takes for granted, and stands as a rare case of one major crime writer finishing another's unfinished series out of direct literary debt rather than commercial franchise continuation.