RIP To The Godfather Of Tartan Noir: Scottish Writer William McIlvanney Dies Age 79

The Guardian reports that William McIlvanney, the author of Laidlaw, has died.

The celebrated Scottish writer William McIlvanney has died aged 79 after a short illness.

The author of the Laidlaw trilogy and numerous other Glasgow-based works such as Docherty, The Big Man and The Kiln died peacefully at his home in the city on Saturday.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/dec/05/scottish-writer-william-mcilvanney-dies-aged-79

You can also Allan Massie's piece in the Telegraph on McIlvanney via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10080000/Scotlands-master-of-crime-is-also-its-Camus.html

William McIlvanney: The Father Of Tartan Noir

Allan Massie in the Wall Street Journal looks back at William McIlvanney's Scottish classic crime novels.

Crime and Scotland go together, fictionally at least. Set aside J.K. Rowling, and the leading, certainly the most popular, Scottish novelists today are crime-writers, with Ian Rankin and Denise Mina only two of those who show us how nefarious activity permeates society. Most genre writers are prolific, a novel a year or every 18 months being normal. There is one notable exception over here, and it’s the man who is widely regarded as the father of “Tartan Noir”: William McIlvanney. He has written only three crime novels, “Laidlaw” (1977), “The Papers of Tony Veitch” (1983) and “Strange Loyalties” (1991), all featuring Glasgow policeman Jack Laidlaw. If three novels seem a narrow foundation for such a reputation, we might remember that Raymond Chandler wrote only half a dozen. Now, after some years out of print, leading a shadowy life in popular memory, the Laidlaw novels are available in handsome editions from Europa Press.   

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-father-of-tartan-noir-1437772631

Face It, Book Snobs, Crime Fiction Is Real Literature - And Ian Rankin Proves It

Allan Massie, the distinguished journalist and author, offers a piece at the British newspaper the Telegraph on crime writer Ian Rankin and crime fiction.

I first met Ian Rankin in 1983 when I held a fellowship in creative writing at Edinburgh University. He was working on a PhD thesis on Muriel Spark and supporting himself with a part-time job as a clerk in the Inland Revenue. He used to bring short stories for me to read, criticise and advise on.

They were sensitive and perceptive stories mostly about childhood in the old mining communities of Fife. Some years later, he turned, sensibly, to crime, and after he had published one novel, I recommended him to my then editor, Euan Cameron at the Bodley Head.

Euan took him on, and Ian has never looked back. He became the most successful crime novelist Scotland has ever produced. He made respectable Edinburgh dangerous, beautiful Edinburgh sinister. There are more than 20 novels featuring his policeman John Rebus. They have been adapted for television and a tourist industry has grown up around them.
 

When I knew him first, he was a thin boy who dressed as most students of the Eighties did. He is middle-aged now, but looks much the same to me, and still dresses as a student and the rock music fan he has always been. But of course, though you mightn’t think so to look at him – or even to hear him speak – he has, as they say, gone up in the world. You can’t be that successful and not do so. This week he has become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which means that he has been received into Scotland’s intellectual elite or, if you prefer, Establishment. I am pretty sure it won’t change him.

There are still people who look down on the crime novel. No crime writer has won the Man Booker Prize. For many, despite the example of PD James and Ruth Rendell, as well as Rankin, crime fiction is still seen as genre fiction, and therefore inferior to the straight novel. It is still viewed with the sort of condescension that irritated Raymond Chandler 70 years ago when he complained of “that snobbism which makes a fourth-rate serious novelist, without style or any real talent, superior by definition to a mystery writer who might have helped recreate a whole literature” – which is, of course, what Chandler knew he had done himself. Some of that snobbism has actually withered, partly because the “straight” or “literary” novel is generally less highly regarded. Nevertheless, there is still a foolish feeling that the crime novel is somehow an inferior genre.

This is palpable nonsense. Many of the greatest novelists have crime at the centre of their work. Sir Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian is a crime novel. Bleak House is a crime novel. So, of course, is Oliver Twist. Dickens indeed was fascinated, even obsessed, by crime and the criminal mind, as were Balzac and Dostoevsky. In the Thirties, André Gide, future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, declared (though he found it difficult to tell a story himself) that Georges Simenon, creator of Maigret and author of scores of dark novels, was the greatest living novelist writing in the French language. That fine novelist Nicolas Freeling even claimed that “in prose fiction, crime is the pre-eminent, and often predominant, theme”. This may be an exaggeration, but not much of one.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/11448255/Face-it-book-snobs-crime-fiction-is-real-literature-and-Ian-Rankin-proves-it.html 

It's Elementary – Of Course Sherlock Holmes Was Real

 

Allan Massie offers an interesting piece in the Telegraph on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional (or perhaps not) iconic character.

The Museum of London has a new exhibition honouring the most famous Englishman of the 19th century. In his lifetime he had rivals for that title – Mr Gladstone, and WG Grace, for instance. But their memory has faded, and Sherlock Holmes stands supreme. It is quite right that the museum should be hosting this exhibition – the first in the capital since 1951 – for Holmes’s London is, even more than Dickens’s, the London of our historical imagination, the London of hansom cabs, horse-dung, flickering gas-light and pea-soup fogs, the London of sinister opium dens in Wapping.

Some still say that there was no real Holmes, that he was only the creation of an Edinburgh-born doctor, Arthur Conan Doyle. For these sceptics, he exists only in four novels and 56 short stories, almost all recounted by his friend, housemate and collaborator, Dr Watson. Yes, they admit, there is indeed a plaque on 221b Baker Street, proclaiming that Sherlock Holmes lived there; but, they add triumphantly, there was no such address when Conan Doyle wrote. It’s all a work of fiction.
 

Tell that to the Marines, but not to the Sherlock Holmes Society, or indeed to its New York brother, the Baker Street Irregulars. Tell it not to the Sherlock Holmes Society of Japan, which has more than 1,000 devoted members; there is a statue of Holmes in Karuizawa. The Japanese, it seems, are devoted to him because, in recounting his struggle with the Napoleon of crime and distinguished mathematician, Professor Moriarty, at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, he ascribed his victory to his knowledge of “baritsu”, the Japanese art of wrestling. (This should correctly be “bartitsu”, we are told; which only goes to prove that Holmes was human and capable of making a mistake.)

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/museums/11171447/Its-elementary-of-course-Sherlock-Holmes-was-real.html

Note: The above DVD cover shows actor Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. He's my favorite Sherlock Holmes actor. 

Crime And Scotland: Scotland's Master Of Crime Is Also Its Camus

As a crime aficionado and having lived in Scotland in 1974 and 1975 while stationed on a Navy tugboat at the U.S. nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland, I'm interested in what is called "Tartan noir.'

So I was interested in Allan Massie's piece on the author of Laidlaw that appeared in the British newspaper the Telegraph.

Crime and Scotland go together, fictionally at least. Set aside Alexander McCall Smith and J K Rowling, and the most-read Scottish novelists today are crime-writers. “Tartan noir” is the name of the game; Ian Rankin and Denise Mina are two of those who most successfully show us criminal activity permeating Scottish society. Most crime writers are prolific, a novel a year, or every 18 months, being normal. There is one notable exception, the man who is widely regarded as “the father of tartan noir”. This is William McIlvanney, and he has written only three crime novels, Laidlaw in 1978, followed by The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties.

If three novels seem a narrow base for such a reputation, we might remember that Raymond Chandler wrote only half a dozen. Now Canongate is bringing out new editions – first Laidlaw, and then the others in the autumn – while Ian Rankin, who has said that without McIlvanney he might not have turned to crime, will be interviewing him at the Harrogate Crime Fiction festival on July 20. It should be an interesting session.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10080000/Scotlands-master-of-crime-is-also-its-Camus.html 

The Best Of The Saint

Allan Massie at the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on the return of the "Saint," Leslie Charteris' fictional character.

Nostalgia, nostalgia, there’s nothing like nostalgia. This, or something like it, will be the reaction of many elderly , or indeed middle-aged, folk to the news that Hodder is bringing Simon Templar, alias “The Saint”, back to life, or at least back into print. Admittedly, the Saint was himself middle-aged, even if also ageless, when we first read him as schoolboys, or when Roger Moore played him with effortless charm on television.

He belongs to the Twenties, to the gentlemen-adventurers who went about biffing baddies and righting wrongs in light-hearted but also ruthless manner. There is a touch of Wodehouse’s Psmith in his persiflage, a touch too of Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion (at least as Campion appeared in Allingham’s early novels). But it is in the company of Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond and Dornford Yates’s Jonathan Mansel and Richard Chandos that he really belongs.

...The Saint is wholly preposterous; that is part of the charm. His creator, Leslie Charteris, must have known this but, at least in the early books, he delighted in his creation, and wrote with an infectious exuberance, often wittily.

You can read rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9668777/The-absurd-irresistible-Simon-Templar-lives-on.html

Hodder & Stoughton, publisher of The Best of the Saint, Volume 1, offers a a selection of the very best of the Saint stories from the early years and an introduced by Ken Follett.

'I am the Saint - you may have heard of me. Just a twentieth-century privateer. In my small way I try to put right a few of the things that are wrong with this cock-eyed world' Simon Templar, aka the Saint.

On the side of the law and yet outside it, the Saint, exciting, debonair and very slightly disreputable, lives for adventure. Here he is at his ebullient best, spreading terror among London's drug dealers, rescuing a lady crook from distress and much, much more.

Leslie Charteris was born in Singapore and moved to England in 1919. He left Cambridge University early when his first novel was accepted for publication. He wrote novels about the Saint throughout his life becoming, alongside Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming, one of the 20th century's most prolific and popular authors.

Note: I'm a fan of the Saint. Although I'm not fond of Roger Moore's portrayal of James Bond, I grew up in the 1960's watching Moore as the Saint on TV. I later saw the older films with George Sanders as the Saint and read the Leslie Charteris' novels. 

Roger Moore and his son are producing a new TV series on the Saint with a young actor portraying Simon Templar. You can read about Moore and the new series via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2013/02/roger-moore-patron-saint-of-smooth.html