So mean city

Set in the rapidly changing Glasgow of the 1970s, Liam McIlvanney’s The Heretic is an impressive crime novel.

The Heretic by Liam McIlvanney

The Heretic is a well-plotted and very enjoyable novel, an outstanding example of northern noir. Any aspiring writer intending to venture into this field would do well to study it and learn from it, for Liam McIlvanney is a fine craftsman who knows just what he is doing and how to do it. There is a wide range of characters, several stereotypes as is almost inevitable in what is among other things a police procedural. The plot is complicated, hovering on the brink of the improbable, but never quite tumbling into it. The city of Glasgow is itself a principal character and I would guess that if you followed the narrative with a street guide to hand you would find no mistakes.

The novel is set in 1975 and this is, for several reasons, a good thing. The Glasgow of 45 years back is recognisable today, yet darkly different. The heart was being stripped out of the Victorian city as motorways were driven through it and neighbourhoods destroyed. It was a time of ferment, the time also of the Troubles across the Irish Sea, and Glasgow, as McIlvanney makes compellingly clear, had more in common with Belfast than with Edinburgh. Gang bosses ruled certain parts of the city, or were believed to do so, and the police were unconstrained by requirements to record interviews with anyone brought in for questioning. The police may not have been as aggressive in real life as they are in these novels, but they were aggressive and some confessions were obtained by means now unlawful. There were corrupt policemen, though not as many as you meet in fiction.

Setting a crime novel almost half a century back also frees the author from encumbering his fiction with too much modern technology and scientific knowhow; no need to employ DNA testing rather than a policeman’s wit to solve murder.

If this is, as I say, a very good example of northern, or Scottish, noir, it also displays some of the genre’s predictability and characteristic social conventions. We now expect that any politicians and lawyers will be corrupt and villainous, that prostitution and prostitutes will feature prominently, some of the women as victims, at least one courageous girl with a heart of gold who will be persuaded, usually by a youngish female detective, to co-operate with the police at great risk to herself, and that any home for deserted and damaged children