Laidlaw returns as festival hails best books
The authors shortlisted for a prestigious award named in tribute to the godfather of Tartan Noir have been revealed by Bloody Scotland.
The international crime writing festival announced five finalists for the coveted Mcilvanney Prize last week, as William Mcillvanney’s unfinished novel, completed by Ian Rankin, was published.
The shortlisted writers are 2015 winner Craig Russell for HYDE; Alan Parks, The April Dead; Stuart Macbride, The Coffin Maker’s Garden; Emma Christie, The Silent Daughter; and Robbie Morrison, for Edge Of The Grave. Both Christie and Morrison are also on the shortlist for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize.
Winners will be revealed at the Albert Halls in Stirling on September 17 and broadcast live online. The main award is held in memory of Mcilvanney, whose final book The Dark Remains was completed with the help of Rankin and launched at the Edinburgh Book Festival. The fourth book to feature the philosophising, mean-streetwalking Glaswegian detective Jack Laidlaw has already won glowing reviews. Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman said: “When William Mcilvanney died in 2015, he left behind various unfinished manuscripts, and his estate commissioned Ian Rankin to complete one of the most intriguing possibilities: after Laidlaw, The Papers Of Tony Veitch and Strange Loyalties there was to be another volume. It is not a collaboration, since that would require the use of a Ouija board.
“There is a tradition of one noted author being asked to complete posthumous works by a figure of similar stature. Wilkie Collins declined to complete Dickens’ The Mystery Of Edwin Drood (others did, variously unsuccessfully) and Collins himself has his unfinished Blind Love finished by Sir Walter Besant. It is in some ways an homage and in some ways an epitaph...enjoyable and thought-provoking.”