–I now describe my country as if to strangers.
I chose those lines as the epigraph for a novel called The Distant Echo, which was published in 2003. Although Scottish crime fiction had started to make an impact far beyond our borders, it still seemed to me that when people thought about Scotland, what they conjured up for themselves was not a real place.
We were late in coming to crime fiction in Scotland. Apart from the odd isolated instance, we didn’t really get started until the late 1970s when the literary novelist Willliam McIlvanney published his first crime novel. The novelist and critic Allan Massie wrote that, “Hemingway used to say that all American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn; all Scottish crime writing—’tartan noir’—comes out of Laidlaw.”
Laidlaw was the first detective story I’d read where people—including the cops—spoke in the vernacular of the streets. Up until that point, almost everyone who had any agency in the British mystery novel was middle-class and educated, except of course for the servants. Who didn’t count. But with this book, in my head, I could hear working class people inhabiting working class lives, their concerns placed front and center by a writer whose prose was always graceful and incisive.
And for the first time, a writer of crime fiction was giving the world a different kind of Scotland. McIlvanney loved Glasgow. He’s lyrical about Glasgow, but at the same time, he never pretends it doesn’t have the seat hanging out of its trousers revealing its scabby backside. “The derelict tenements were big darknesses housing old griefs, terrible angers. They were prisons for the past. They welcomed ghosts . . . There was a stairway that would have been dangerous for someone who had anything to lose.”
1950s Glasgow was a city of sectarianism and gangs, a city of corruption and calumny. How come Scotland’s bookshelves weren’t rammed with noir fictions explaining us to ourselves and the rest of the world? Why did it take us so long to embrace a genre that appears to have been designed specifically for our dark winter skies and the dour Presbyterian side of our national character?
I could hear working class people inhabiting working class lives, their concerns placed front and center by a writer whose prose was always graceful and incisive.I think the answer can be laid at the door of one man. When you get off the train in Edinburgh, you alight at the only railway station in the world named after a novel. Edinburgh Waverley. When you emerge, you’re confronted with an ornate Gothic spire stained black by years of pollution. It’s the biggest monument to a writer anywhere in the world and it honors the memory of Sir Walter Scott. He published 21 novels between 1814 and 1832, and those novels, coupled with the myth he constructed around himself, were responsible for a confection of Scottishness that has proved remarkably persistent in spite of its lack of grounding in any recognizable historic reality. The historian Lord Macaulay wrote, “Soon the vulgar imagination was so completely occupied by plaids, targes and claymores that, by most Englishmen, ‘Scotchmen’ and ‘Highlander’ were regarded as synonymous words. Few people seemed to be aware that a Macdonald or a Macgregor in his tartan was to a citizen of Edinburgh or Glasgow what an Indian hunter in his war paint is to an inhabitant of Philadelphia or Boston. At length this fashion reached a point beyond which it was not easy to proceed.”
We accepted the bogus tartan caricature. And it hog-tied us. The novelist and historian J.M. Reid wrote in the 1920s, “Nineteenth century Scotland was one of the chief centers of the industrial world. Its society was complex and curious enough to feed and excite any keen observer of human nature. Yet there is no Scottish Balzac or Dickens, not even any Thackeray or Trollope. Scottish writers and their readers both inside the country and elsewhere preferred Scott-land to Scotland.”
It was quite a straitjacket to burst out of. We had a couple of classic escapees, of course—Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle. But their criminal fictions were not set in their native land. And their choice of London for their great popular success seems somehow to have to have buried their origins. Their work contains the elements of what we have come to know as Tartan Noir—the fascination with what lies beneath, the psychology of crime, the idea of duality and the doppelgänger, and those occasional shafts of black humor—but London disguises that distinctiveness.
Another notable exception was Josephine Tey. Only one of her eight detective novels is set in Scotland, and it determinedly eschews the more urban central belt for the Scott-land of the Highlands and the islands. Her novels are clever explorations of human behavior, betraying a concern with identity and gender that was unusual for the detective fiction of the time. She was ahead of her time, so still the Scots had to wait for someone to break the deadlock.
And that brings us back to William McIlvanney painting Glasgow in all its somber colors and vivid personalities. But why him and why then?
McIlvanney had won the literary Whitbread novel prize in 1975 for Docherty, a moving portrait of a miner whose courage and determination were stretched to the limit during the Depression of the 1920s. He was a writer of great elegance and compassion who was never going to be constrained by other people’s expectations. He turned to crime with Laidlaw because he was passionate about writing the lives of working class people and he saw the detective story as a milieu where he could effectively do that.
I had several conversations with Willie McIlvanney over the years and I believe that extra dimension was one that made this genre appealing to him. And whatever he wrote was always going to be set in the Scotland he knew—a country of urban communities living cheek by jowl, a landscape of steel mills and coal mines and shipyards, a precarious world where poverty and unemployment were always lurking in the wings.
But there was another driving force behind Laidlaw and that was Scottish politics. In the 1970s, the Scottish people had increasingly become disillusioned with what they saw as a democratic deficit. Politicians wanted our vote but all they appeared to offer was a kind of benign neglect. Scotland was a far away country of whose people they knew nothing and cared less.
And so a movement started to establish a devolved parliament in Scotland. But Scots needed the ability to imagine themselves inhabiting an independent nation. We had to imagine what it meant to be Scottish at the tail end of the 20th century. What were our values? What made our culture distinctive? What kind of politics did we want to espouse? How would we ever develop a world-class football team?
There’s nothing didactically political in Laidlaw, but its portrait of Scottish life raises a whole range of questions about the choices people made and the areas of their lives where no significant choices were possible. All over Scotland, the political conversation was growing. Sometimes muted, sometimes very bloody loud indeed. And one of the key arenas where the conversation continued was in the written word. Novelists, playwrights, poets, historians, philosophers.
To start a movement, somebody has to blaze a trail. To open the door a crack so the rest of us can see something tantalizing through the gap. With Laidlaw, McIlvanney fired the starting pistol.
It took us a decade to push that door open a bit further, but Ian Rankin and I, unbeknownst to each other, had been slaving away in our respective garrets. Me in Manchester, Ian in the depths of rural France. And when our debut crime novels materialized they reflected our Scottish identity and sensibility.
My Report for Murder is partly set in Glasgow, and although my journalist protagonist Lindsay Gordon had grown up in rural Scotland, the city is where she found herself and established the life she wanted. Over the course of the six novels in the series, Lindsay lives a geographically varied life—London, Italy, San Francisco and finally, back to Glasgow—but she is unequivocally Scottish.
With his first Rebus novel, Ian Rankin also looks back over his shoulder to the Scotland he left behind. And over the last 30 years, he’s used Edinburgh as a lens to examine a range of issues that have captured the headlines in Scotland, from people trafficking to the final establishment of the parliament in 1999. Sometimes critical, sometimes merely reflective, Rankin’s success helped push that door open even wider and a whole raft of crime writers followed us, almost all setting their books in the country’s urban centers.
What we write about is conditioned by the place itself. The sort of stories that work against an Edinburgh backdrop will not necessarily ring true in Aberdeen or Dundee.Writing about contemporary Scotland has offered us a fascinating range of possibilities and individual writers have made those landscapes their own. I see another divergence from the classic tropes of crime fiction in those novels, and that is their organic nature. What we write about is conditioned by the place itself. The sort of stories that work against an Edinburgh backdrop will not necessarily ring true in Aberdeen or Dundee. St Andrews isn’t going to sustain the same plotlines as Glasgow. To the outsider, the new Scotland may seem as homogenous as Scott-land. But the more you explore the fiction, the more you will come to understand that we have the same sort of regional variations as exist in America.
And a large part of the reason for that is that landscape is also affected by those who populate it. I came back to live in Scotland a few years ago and the country I came back to is categorically not the country I left. The figures in the landscape have changed almost beyond recognition. I have a present-day series character who is a cold-case detective in Edinburgh. It’s impossible to imagine Karen Pirie in Laidlaw’s world. And it’s almost impossible to imagine Jack Laidlaw in hers. Almost, because the dinosaurs are not quite extinct.
Of course Ian Rankin and I are no longer an isolated phenomenon. It wasn’t long before the next wave of Tartan Noir gave us a quartet of writers who continue to grow and develop with every book they write. They have become the anatomists of modern Scotland and their books are where you should turn if you want to understand what Scotland is and how the last 20 years have brought us here. If you want to understand Scotland now, read Denise Mina, Chris Brookmyre, Louise Welsh and Stuart MacBride. Diverse, dark and deadly, vivid, violent, and visceral, what they have in common is their unflinching desire to tell it like they see it.
Some people feared Scottish crime fiction would soon run out of steam. That Tartan Noir would be a passing phase. But there seems to be no slowing in the flow of our creative juices. We even have our own dedicated annual festival, Bloody Scotland. If you want to enjoy the most challenging and adventurous contemporary crime fiction, check out a trio of exciting new writers who can provide just that—Graeme Macrae Burnet, Abir Mukherjee and Mary Paulson-Ellis.
I think it’s fair to say that we have well and truly escaped Scott-land thanks to murder and mayhem. And that’s been a crucially important thing for Scottish crime fiction. I think the crime novel is a three-legged stool—character, plot, and a sense of place. If we don’t inhabit the landscape, we are immediately adrift. That’s why it remains crucial to describe our country as if to strangers.
