When the widow of Scottish writer William McIlvanney needed someone to finish the book her husband had started before his death, there was only one person to call.
Fellow Scot and crime writer Ian Rankin, a huge admirer of McIlvanney and creator of the famous Rebus crime novels, took on the mantle of McIlvanney and his creation Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw.
McIlvanney died in 2015 and left behind a half-written manuscript about Laidlaw's first case.
Ian Rankin Photo: AFP / FILE
Listen to the full interview with Ian Rankin
Rankin has finished the book called the Dark Remains.
The offer to take on the unfinished project came out of the blue during last year’s Covid lockdown, he told Jesse Mulligan.
“I had just finished writing a Rebus novel, Song for the Dark Times, and I was preparing to take some time off and I was contacted by William McIlvanney’s publisher/editor, who said that his widow Siobhan had come to them, having typed up about 100 pages of notes, handwritten notes.”
Rankin started to look over the notes and became intrigued, he says.
“The first thing is it was an act of archaeology. I had to see what was in there and could it form a novel? And then once I'd done that, and thought, yeah you could if you do X, Y, and Z, you can get a novel from this.
"I then had to think, am I the guy to do it? Can I mimic his voice? Can I get inside his head? Can I make it his landscape and not mine?"
Taking on the project was unlike anything Rankin had tackled before, he says.
“I sat and read the books. He wrote three novels with this character Jack Laidlaw, and I just read and reread and reread the books and try to get the rhythms of his voice, the way he thinks, the way the novelist thinks, and also the way the character thinks, before I proceeded to write. So, it was a lot of trepidation along the way.”
McIlvanney was a big influence on Rankin, he says.
“He made it okay for me to be a crime writer. I mean I grew up working class, so did William McIlvanney. He was self-taught, he was passionate about writing from an early age, so was I.
“I arrived at university, the first member of my family to go to university to study literature. My parents thought I was wasting my time, I wasn't going to get a career out of that.
“But I wanted to be a writer and in 1985, I was a post graduate student and McIlvanney was coming to Edinburgh to talk at the book festival and I ran up to him carrying a paperback copy of one of his books and said, ‘oh I'm writing a book that's a little bit like Laidlaw, but set in Edinburgh’ and that was the first Rebus book.
“And he actually signed the book to me ‘good luck with the Edinburgh Laidlaw’.”
McIlvanney’s unfinished book is set in Glasgow in 1972, says Rankin.
“I knew from the get go that the book was set in probably October 1972, because the film of The Godfather was referenced a few times. I dug into Google and found out that had been released in the UK in August, September. So, it was probably October before it was playing in places like Glasgow.”
In 1972, Rankin was 12 and growing up on the other side of the country on the east coast of Scotland, so Glasgow in the 1970s was relatively unfamiliar territory.
“His books were useful to me, although the books that he published were set mostly in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s but they were a useful template.
“I managed to source lots of old maps or street plans of Glasgow, and then praise be lockdown was lifted for a short time and the libraries reopened and I got into the National Library of Scotland for a couple of days and just pulled up all the Glasgow Herald newspapers from 1972.”
That was an invaluable source of background, he says.
“I could find out what was happening in the city politically what was happening in the world politically, what was on TV, on any given night.
“The clothes shops where people were buying clothes from, what cars people were driving …all that kind of stuff, local colour.”
Photo: Allen and Unwin
The project was fun he says, and an escape during the early months of Covid-19 in the UK.
“It was an escape from Camp Pandemic.
“I could go back in time to a much gentler, kinder world where there might be gangsters and knife fights and murders, but there wasn't a bloody pandemic going around.”
He lost himself in a simpler world, Rankin says.
“Because the book’s set in 1972, it was a simpler world. I didn't have to worry about mobile phones, I didn't have to worry about CCTV or DNA analysis at the crime scene, or computers, police stations did not have any form of computer back then. So, it was old fashioned policing.
“It was a guy who walks the streets, who goes out and talks to people and he's got a network of informers. And a lot of the book, as with William McIlvanney’s other crime novels, is a lot of hard men sitting around in bars, smoking cigarettes and playing mind games with each other.”
For the project to be a success, Rankin’s voice should be silent, he says.
“This is meant to be an act of ventriloquism on my part, if you can see me at any point in his book, I have failed.
“This ought to be his world, his characters, his philosophy, his style. And the nicest compliment I've had so far was that when his widow Siobhan read the manuscript, she wrote me a lovely hand-written letter.
“She was isolating for health reasons, hadn't been out of the house for almost a year, she wrote me a lovely handwritten letter. And she said two things. She said, ‘One I can't see the join. I can't see where it stops being William starts being you Ian’. And number two, ‘as I read it was as though he was in the room with me, I could hear his voice talking to me’.
“And my heart broke at that point. But also, there was a flood of relief. I thought, even if nobody else likes the book, it's still job done.”
McIlvanney left a large gap in the story, Rankin says.
“There was a beginning and an end, but there was no middle, and up to the point where Willie didn't even lay down on paper who the killer was.
“So, I was trying to read between the lines and work out where his head was at when he was writing these notes to himself. I think he knew [the killer], but because he knew he didn't feel the need to write it down.”
Glasgow remains very different to Edinburgh and McIlvanney captured a great manufacturing city starting to decline in the early 1970s, Rankin says.
“Glasgow had prided itself on being the second city of the Empire. It was a place where stuff got made, it was where world trade happened.
William McIlvanney Photo: AFP / FILE
“The shipyards were beginning to close down at this time, no cars were being built anymore. And so, it was a city that was undergoing huge structural changes and the people who lived in it were also undergoing huge cyclical upheavals.
“And you sense that in his books. I wanted to get that across in this book as well, these gangsters are also quite fragile men because they can see the world changing around them in ways that they cannot control. Even at the end of a knife or a razor.”
Rankin doesn’t envisage taking on a similar project again, this was a tribute to a literary hero, he says.
“I did it because I wanted to honour William McIlvanney and because I did see him as the godfather of Scottish crime fiction.
“And because I wanted more people to come to his books, I don't think I could do it with any other writer.”
It did though plant a seed about his own creation Rebus.
“My guy Rebus is coming to the end of his useful life. He's no longer a detective, he's now long retired, it's beginning to become a little bit of a stretch to try and get him involved in a criminal investigation when he's basically an old age pensioner.”
Writing as William McIlvanney has unlocked a penchant for historical writing, he says.
“Now I've been convinced that if I do want to do that, if I want to take Rebus down the prequal road and do a book set in the 1980s, before we got to know him in the first Rebus novel, I think I now have the confidence to do that in a way that I didn't have previously. So again, I've got to thank McIlvanney for that.”