Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Laidlaw | 1977 | William McIlvanney | Buy |
| 2 | The Papers of Tony Veitch | 1983 | William McIlvanney | Buy |
| 3 | Strange Loyalties | 1991 | William McIlvanney | Buy |
| 4 | The Dark Remains | 2021 | William McIlvanney | Buy |
The Jack Laidlaw series was created by William McIlvanney and is considered the origin point of “Tartan Noir,” the Scottish crime fiction tradition that would later produce writers like Ian Rankin and Denise Mina. Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw works Glasgow’s streets with a philosophical mind and a refusal to accept easy answers. He is as troubled by the social conditions that breed crime as he is by the crimes themselves.
Laidlaw (1977) introduced the detective as he investigates the murder of a young woman in Glasgow. The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) follows Laidlaw as a dying man’s last words send him searching for a missing student. Strange Loyalties (1991) turns inward as Laidlaw investigates his own brother’s death. After William McIlvanney died in 2015, his son Liam McIlvanney completed The Dark Remains (2021) from an unfinished manuscript, bringing Laidlaw back to 1970s Glasgow for a case involving the city’s criminal underworld.