Open Letters Monthly: "My advice would be to go to Europa’s website and buy all three … trust me, you’re going to want to binge on them."

Our book today is William McIlvanney’s Strange Loyalties (not, as the last couple of “Mystery Mondays” might lead you to believe, Strange Loyalties … of the Dead!), the third murder mystery novels to feature Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw, who stalks the mean streets of 1970s Glasgow and is routinely referred to by his superiors on the force as a “maverick.” Laidlaw first appeared in 1977’s Laidlaw, a nearly-flawless example of the ‘hardboiled’ sub-genre of mysteries, and next in 1983’s superb The Papers of Tony Veitch. Strange Loyalties first appeared 1991, and the good folks at Europa Editions deserve drinks all around for their decision to re-issue the trilogy in these stylish paperbacks as part of their “World Noir” series.

If anybody deserves a place in that series, it’s McIlvanney, who’s won a series of literary awards as long as your arm and is widely credited with inventing the whole realm of gritty Scottish noir that’s treated authors like Ian Rankin so well ever since. One of the main ingredients of that brand of noir is a main character who’s a) well-versed in literature but rusty at recalling it, b) a smart mouth, and c), needless to say, a reflexive, excuse-making, embittered alcoholic (it’s also fairly standard for this main character to have a less interesting and less edgy mother-hen style partner, in this case Laidlaw’s colleague Brian Harkness, whose compared to a worrying old lady in every book – in this one, it first happens on page 23). Laidlaw is a quintessential mixture of these ingredients; he hates every element of the law-and-order system of which he’s a part, from the judges at the top:
Those judges, I thought … Never mind having little understanding of the human heart, they often didn’t have much grasp of the daily machinery of the lives they were presuming to judge. Time and again the voice had quavered querulously down from Mount Olympus, asking the question that stunned: ‘A transistor? What exactly do you mean by that?’ ‘UB40? Is that some kind of scientific formula?’ (‘Not a formula, Your Honour. A form. An unemployment form.’) ‘An unemployment form? And what is that?’

To the lawyers in the middle:
‘A brilliant lawyer’ was a phrase I had often heard. That was all right if all you meant was an ability to play legal games. But what did that mean? Intelligence as a closed circuit. Intelligence should never be a closed circuit. Take them off the stage that is a law court, where the forms are all present, and a lot of them wouldn’t know tears from rain.

To the majority of his fellow cops, many of whom (Brian included) are irritated as Strange Loyalties opens that Laidlaw is obsessing more than usual about what seems on the surface to be a simple car accident in which the drunken victim wandered out into the road and was killed accidentally. The reason for Laidlaw’s obsession is stark: the victim was his brother Scott, a gregarious type with “a head busier than an anthill.” Now that his initial grief has worn off, Laidlaw’s relentless bent for questioning everything has kicked in:
“I know it was an accident … But where did the accident begin? That’s what I want to know. In the middle of the road? At the kerb? In the pub before he went out? In the fact that he drank too much? In the reasons why he drank too much? When did the accident begin? And why? When did my brother’s life give up its purpose? So that it could wander aimlessly for years till it walked into a car? Why? Why did it lose itself until we found it lying in front of that car? I want to know. Why do the best of us go to waste while the worst of us flourish? I want to know.”

It will come as no surprise to police-procedural mystery readers that what seems like an open-and-shut roadway accident turns out to be much more complicated; Laidlaw’s stubborn snooping is soon uncovering all sorts of things about his brother that he’d rather not know but can’t ignore. Likewise readers familiar with McIlvanney’s novels will know to expect proceedings to get more gripping (and often more darkly funny) as the plot picks up steam – and that’s certainly the case with Strange Loyalties. And readers not familiar with the Laidlaw books – well, they’re in for quite a treat. My advice would be to go to Europa’s website and buy all three … trust me, you’re going to want to binge on them.