A novel experience with a star

SADLY, we lost the writer William McIlvanney at the weekend: he won literary awards and garnered critical praise for his Glasgow urban realism, but for his many readers he was simply the big man of Scottish letters.

I first met him when I was ten and we happened to be in the same bookshop in Ayr. He was signing copies of his latest crime novel. I was nosing through the children’s section. On his way out, he came over and asked me what I was looking for and we ended up chatting.

McIlvanney, left, was already a Scottish superstar – but since I hadn’t read Laidlaw, Docherty or The Papers of Tony Veitch, I had no idea who he was. Even so, this dapper man with the natty moustache and Brylcreemed hair reminded me of Clark Gable films and took a kindly interest in the sort of books I liked to read, so I asked for his autograph.

I found the scrap of paper he signed in a recent clear-up. He’d written: ‘For Siobhan, who has the same name as my own daughter. Best wishes, William McIlvanney.’

I didn’t see him again until I started working at the BBC. The Big Man, his novel about a bare knuckle boxer, had been made into a movie with Liam Neeson and Billy Connolly and premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It wasn’t McIlvanney’s fault the film was more rocky than Rocky, but after it ended he was keen to put as much distance as possible between himself and the movie and fled down the street. I ran after him in order to get a few words.

Finally, he let me catch up and as I got my breath back, tapped me playfully. ‘Tag’, he said. ‘Your turn again.’