When William McIlvanney, one of the crime writing greats, passed away in 2015, he left a handwritten manuscript of the infamous Laidlaw’s first case. Years later, Ian Rankin is back to finish what McIlvanney started – two iconic authors bringing to life the criminal world of 1970s Glasgow, and Laidlaw’s relentless quest for truth. David Robinson reviews.

The Dark Remains
By William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin
Published by Canongate

In Val McDermid’s new novel 1979, set in Glasgow in that year, there’s a moment when her journalist protagonist remembers the first time she read William McIlvanney’s Laidlaw. ‘It was set in a working-class Glasgow she recognised immediately,’ she notes. ‘She was intrigued by the quality of the prose, which was an uncommon feature in the detective stories she’d previously read.’

This is one of those moment when fiction hovers close to autobiography, because in 1977, when Laidlaw came out, McDermid was a 22-year-old reporter working on the Daily Record. She bought a copy and had a similar epiphany.  ‘From its opening chapter,’ she has written, ‘I’d never read a crime novel like this. Patricia Highsmith had taken us into the heads of killers; Ruth Rendell had explored sexuality; Alexander McArthur had exposed Glasgow to the world; Raymond Chandler had dressed the darkness in clever words. But nobody had ever smashed those elements together in so accomplished a synthesis.’

It’s this shock of Laidlaw’s newness, back in 1977, that we should keep in mind. To recapture its  freshness, try unimagining 27 seasons of Taggart and the entire output of the Glasgow Branch of the Tartan Noir Writers’ Union. The debt to McIvanney isn’t any smaller at the other end of the M8. In 1985, for example, Ian Rankin – just 25 and still with no published book to his name – tentatively approached McIlvanney at the Edinburgh book festival, and told him that he was working on a crime novel ‘that’s a bit like Laidlaw, but set in Edinburgh’. ‘Good luck with the Edinburgh Laidlaw’ McIlvanney wrote in Rankin’s copy.

With The Dark Remains, in which Rankin has completed a half-written manuscript McIlvanney left behind when he died in 2015, he has repaid any lingering literary debt in full. McIlvanney fans will want to read it, and so will Rankin’s own worldwide army of followers: I fully expect it to be  bobbing at or near the top of the hardback fiction bestseller charts for months on end. Yet because the two writers are so distinct, I can understand anyone feeling a certain degree of apprehension too: yes, this could easily be a book in which Rankin’s virtuosity with plot enhances McIlvanney’s visceral characterisation. But what if becomes a Rankin novel not a McIlvanney one, or if Rankin is too respectful of Jack Laidlaw’s occasional offkey speechifying and leaves things that should have been lost in the edit?  And while the prospect of a joint Rankin/McIvanney novel would make any crime fan salivate, couldn’t it just as easily be a charade, one song to the tune of another, an inharmonious hybrid pleasing no-one?

Well, yes it could, but no it isn’t. Because although Rankin has gone on to become Britain’s pre-eminent crime writer, he didn’t start off with that aim in mind – far from it: when Noughts & Crosses came out in 1987, he would surreptitiously switch bookshop copies from the ‘crime’ to the ‘fiction’ sections.  McIlvanney would have understood: when he wrote Laidlaw years earlier, he too had been adamant that this didn’t mean that he’d become a crime writer. Both men started writing about a detective in their city for the same reason – when it comes to getting an all-encompassing, top-to-bottom view of the place, who is better  than a gruff, unfooled, CID officer?

Given Rankin’s respect for McIlvanney, it’s no surprise that he hasn’t made too many changes to Laidlaw’s world.  The main one is McIlvanney’s – this is a prequel, set in 1972, when Laidlaw is still a detective constable, and after the first-person experiment of Strange Loyalties, we’re back with third-person narration. But everything about DC Laidlaw’s modus operandi appears to be the same, even when it seems frankly batty, like catching buses around Glasgow rather than learning to drive and practically living in a city centre hotel while on a case rather than heading back home to Graithnock (to what is, admittedly a stale marriage even then).

The rest of the setup is also recognisable. John Rhodes is still the vaguely moral gang boss of Calton, the cops still drink in The Top Spot, DI Milligan is still spectacularly dim-witted, Laidlaw still drinks Antiquary and lugs around copies of Unamuno, Kierkegaard and Camus (though, we are told, the real reason is that he wants to bamboozle his colleagues). The bigger background picture – the sectarianism that rips through families, that makes fathers doubt daughters if there’s ever a hint of them even flirting across the great divide – is omnipresent, and written into the tiniest details.

Then there’s the violence. We forget how ubiquitous it was in the early Seventies Glasgow. In his recent autobiography, The Accidental Footballer, Pat Nevin recalls playing in an under-12s side in Easterhouse, when play was stopped by two gangs clashing on the pitch and about 50 gangsters wielding swords, baseball bats and (for some reason) cricket bats. ‘They fought their way from one side of the pitch to the other, and when they’d gone, the referee blew his whistle and play restarted as if nothing had happened.’ In No Mean City, no big deal.

Here, as well as teen gangs such as the Gorbals Cumbie, are the even more violent adult variety. Glasgow is divided between three of them, and as The Dark Remains opens, one gang has had its consigliere murdered. His body has been dumped in a back alley on a rival’s patch. Is this something to do with his ex-girlfriend or entirely to do with gangs? Is the placing of the body a declaration of war by the most obvious gang rival or an attempt by the third gang leader to divide and rule? All these possibilities are equally balanced, but the novel looks at another hard-to-guage future too. Suppose you were a gangster in the weakened gang, would you sense an opportunity in the consigliere’s death or start to suspect your fellow gang members of cutting deals with the stronger gang?

This part of the plot is drum-tight, certainly more than any of the three Laidlaw novels. It pushes forwards more insistently than I remember a McIlvanney novel doing, where there always seemed to be time to spend a page lovingly describing an incidental and maybe even irrelevant character, like Fast Frankie’s dying mother in Strange Loyalties or the small man in a boiler suit (not even named) in a printing works who gossips about his boss’s sexual shenanigans and saunters irresistibly off page 148 in Canongate’s new edition of Laidlaw. Personally, I never read McIlvanney for plot (everything else, yes), so it’s slightly unexpected to come across one here, like finding a reconditioned engine in a much-loved car.

Let’s zoom in on those two gangsters I mentioned earlier. Just as the central characters in Docherty and The Big Man are partly admired for being good with their fists, so are the gangsters in The Dark Remains. When they walk Glasgow’s mean streets, the citizenry know better than to get in their way. Mickey and Spanner are doing just that on page 220, and because of the plot’s fancy footwork, the reader knows that neither of them has the slightest inkling about whether or not to trust the other. The tension between them is exquisite: it’s a scene so balanced that if this book ever gets made into a film, it will get the full treatment, with all of the dialogue going in as written.  Let’s look at how Rankin/McIlvanney describes the scene:

‘They were passing a knot of middle-aged men, caps fixed tightly to heads, collars up. There were greetings, the intoning of ‘Mickey’ and ‘Spanner’. It felt almost liturgical, these men hungry for a blessing, receiving at best a nodded acknowledgement of their existence.’

Who wrote that? Rankin? It would fit my notion that he’s the man behind the tighter plotting and it does come quite late on in the book, which could well be another indication. But that respect for the Big Man, violent enforcer of sometimes oddly moral codes? Well, that could be McIlvanney’s description of gangster John Rhodes in Laidlaw: ‘The man looked big and strong [but] what impressed him was the stillness. He didn’t fidget under the stare.’ I really can’t tell. Can you?

The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin is published by Canongate this month, priced £20. Canongate is also bringing out new editions of McIlvanney’s novels Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties, priced £8.99 each.